Actually curious how though - I mean won’t it just let all programs/users access everything? Or do some system stuff rely on permissions for certain behavior?
I’ve worked with Linux for decades at this point and I’m still not 100% sure exactly what breaks; it’s a mistake you make once, if at all, and you’ll only get a little way into even trying to figure out how to fix things before you throw your hands up in disgust and reinstall / restore the OS (or whatever subdir was affected).
If I was to hazard a guess, it’s the kernel itself that balks, but there are other, almost as fundamental things (lib*.so files and the like) that may also be deliberately fussy.
I actually don’t know how many programs do this, but several check that file permissions are correct or refuse to work. Sudo and ash are 2 of them. I could see /etc/shadow being readable and writable by everyone being a problem too, but I don’t know.
Actually curious how though - I mean won’t it just let all programs/users access everything? Or do some system stuff rely on permissions for certain behavior?
Theoretically yes, but yes, in that order.
I’ve worked with Linux for decades at this point and I’m still not 100% sure exactly what breaks; it’s a mistake you make once, if at all, and you’ll only get a little way into even trying to figure out how to fix things before you throw your hands up in disgust and reinstall / restore the OS (or whatever subdir was affected).
If I was to hazard a guess, it’s the kernel itself that balks, but there are other, almost as fundamental things (lib*.so files and the like) that may also be deliberately fussy.
SSH will definitely break, I’ve had this issue before. If your private key in the .ssh dir is too open, ssh won’t let you use it.
I actually don’t know how many programs do this, but several check that file permissions are correct or refuse to work. Sudo and ash are 2 of them. I could see /etc/shadow being readable and writable by everyone being a problem too, but I don’t know.
Some things refuse to run with too broad permissions