How do I reverse chown -R www-data:www-data *?

Posted on December 12, 2018

I was not able to update plugin in my wordpress so I followed a tutorial that said I should run the following command: chown -R www-data:www-data *

After running the command, the following was all I can see when i visit my site:

Forbidden You don’t have permission to access / on this server. Apache/2.4.29 (Ubuntu) Server at vplaya.com Port 80

Any help will be appreciated

Thank you, Thebe

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unixynet

December 12, 2018

What do these commands return:

ps -elf|grep httpd
grep '^User\|^Group' -r /etc/apache2/conf

And run this after you’ve visited the site so the error is logged right then:

tail /var/log/httpd/error_log

Thebe Phele

December 12, 2018

Hi Unixynet,

I figured out that hat command that I ran initially actually deleted the entire www folder, so I had to replace content with the backup. It’s all good now and I guess I will have to find an easier way to update plugins that to destroy my site with some nasty commands like I did.

Thanks for the reply though, much appreciated.

Regards, Thebe