Ubuntu

owner 999:999

Asked by LEGOManiac

After transferring my hard drive to another computer, both my son and I got errors about not being able to access .ICEauthority.

I checked the file on my account and it had owner 999:999, so I chown'ed it my ownership and I was able to log in again.

On my son's account, .ICEauthority was also 999:999 but changing the ownership didn't totally resolve the problem. Now there's another error about a sanity_check failing with error 256. When I checked the ownerships on his account, I see that almost all the hidden files have owner 999:999.

What does the 999 represent and how did so many files get changed?

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Ryan Dwyer
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Best Ryan Dwyer (ryandwyer) said : 		#1

They are the user and group IDs that own the files. Normally it displays the names instead of IDs, but you don't have a user or group on your system with ID 999 so it can only show the ID.

You'll need to change the owner for all those files before you can use them. If you're familiar with the terminal you can do this with:

chown -R user:group /home/user

(Swap user and group with the actual name.)

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LEGOManiac (bzflaglegomaniac) said : 		#2

Thanks Ryan Dwyer, that solved my question.