Sysadmin Urgent : Messed up permissions - any solution ?

Ouch you're screwed. Only 100% sure way of fixing is reinstalling again unfortunately

a little trick in future to minimise the mess is if you are manually typing commands is to also change into the directory you're targetting first before running chmod, chown, rm, etc commands and using full path to file or directory you want to delete/chown/chmod etc

i.e. need to delete contents in /home/nginx/domains/domain.com/public/dir1

instead of

Code (Text):

rm -rf /home/nginx/domains/domain.com/public/dir1/*

or

Code (Text):

cd /home/nginx/domains/domain.com/public/dir1/
rm -rf *

do instead

Code (Text):

cd /home/nginx/domains/domain.com/public/dir1
rm -rf /home/nginx/domains/domain.com/public/dir1/*

also use command to list your present working directory always before running commands

Code (Text):

pwd

this tells you were you are directory wise right now so to double check you are running commands in right place

when you first log into server, pwd command will give you = /root location

Code (Text):

pwd
/root

change into /usr/local/src/centminmod and run pwd will give you = /usr/local/src/centminmod present working directory

Code (Text):

cd /usr/local/src/centminmod
pwd
/usr/local/src/centminmod

 

indeed it is, getting into habit of using pwd command first as second nature will save your bacon most of the times

 

ah yes - train yourself to wait a few seconds between up/down arrow keys to let the command that you scroll to to settle. Sometimes there could be lag between the next entry showing up especially you you git up/down arrow keys many times successively.