One of my niece's came to visit me yesterday and as I was trying to make copys of old family photos I found all the old photos locked and I could not copy them. I went to permissions and change it to read and write, that did not change anything still could not copy photos. does anyone have an idea how to get around this locked program?

dinga

Best guess is that you don't "own" them anymore. In other words, you put them in your computer under a different user name

I'll post a fix in a few.

Try something like the following command:

sudo chown -R $(whoami): /path/to/locked/pictures

The command should set your user as the owner of the files, making it possible to access them freely again.

I think it needs to have usergroup in there as well.

sudo chown -R username:usergroup /path/to/locked/pictures

Obviously, the username:group needs to be changed to reflect your actual username. Normally, in your case, these should be the same.

warfacegod wrote:

I think it needs to have usergroup in there as well.

sudo chown -R username:usergroup /path/to/locked/pictures

Obviously, the username:group needs to be changed to reflect your actual username. Normally, in your case, these should be the same.

That's where you go wrong.
The following command:

chown <username>:

Takes the primary group of the userid and sets that as the groupid value.
Without the colon, it will only set the userid.

Fine. You can out geekspeak me. The way I postedit has always worked for me. ...And that's the way I learned it from you. :P

Hmm, I didn't know there was a shorthand like that. I thought you had to either specify the group name or not set it at all.

Also of note: you can use a dot instead of a colon, so if your local manpage recommends that, either form should work.

I spent 3 hours last night working with this kept getting invlaid options. from terminal help I went to:
www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/chown
where it (if I understand what it said) to use -h instead of -r this got me to path which I entered like this:
/home/pictures/childhood/locked/ and /home/pictures/childhood/
and I get from both no such directory found. I must be doing some thing wrong on the path. I will now go look up paths and try to learn something.

You forget to put your /home/username/ into the file path?

warfacegod wrote:

And that's the way I learned it from you. :P

Doubtful as I've been using the short version for quite a few years now...