linux - Recovering from bad chown command

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I was going to change the ownership of
a directory to apache:apache, but I ended up
running:

chown -R apache:apache
            /

Bad! Very bad! I
knew what was going on when it started
saying:

chown: changing ownership of `/proc/2694/fd/48': Permission
denied

That's when
I stopped everything (Ctrl+C).

/>

The current system I have is a server running
virtualbox running CentOS 5. This problem happened inside the
VM.

Currently, everything seems to be working,
but I have not restarted the system yet, and to be honest, I'm afraid that if I did
something will break.

I do not know
chown's order, should I be concerned and assume something will
break after a reboot? Is there a way to recover form this problem without having to rely
on backups? I do have a daily one, but I thought there may be a simpler way
out.

Answer

It would be good to have an old backup, but
IMHO it would suffice to be able to extract the ownership
data.

I would it do this
way:

• First, make
  a backup of the current state.




• Then,
  restore the original properties according to the RPMDB. This will probably repair a lot
  of your files





• To identify
  and repair the remaining ones, find all files which are still subject to this problem.
  These are the files which belong to apache:apache and are in
  the "search order" before /proc . Maybe you
  do

  
  
  

  ls -U
              /
  

  
  
  

  first and get the
  list of root level entries before /proc (I suppose this is
  where you canceled the process).

  
  
  

  Then do a
  

  
  
  

  find /foo /bar /baz -user apache
              -group
              apache
  
  

  
  
  

  replacing
  foo, bar, baz
  with the entries identified before. Redirect find's output to a
  file.




• Extract all the ownership data
  of the given files from the backup and apply them to the
  files.