chown username:username .Xauthority

Question

I'm stuck in a login loop Ubuntu 17.04. When I go to tty1 and type chown username:roey .Xauthority taken from Ubuntu gets stuck in a login loop

It says that my user doesn't exist.

What is the problem? How can I log back in to Ubuntu-Gnome?

rm .Xauthority and allow it to get recreated – Joshua May 19 '17 at 20:23 — Joshua, May 19 '17 at 20:23

Rinzwind · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-19T15:46:27.893

12

The command is

sudo chown roey:roey .Xauthority

1st roey is the user, 2nd is the group roey

edited May 19 '17 at 15:46

answered May 19 '17 at 14:36

Rinzwind

5

+1, but you will need `sudo` if it's not yours already and btw the second `roey` is superfluous as just adding the colon after the first one changes the group as well – Zanna May 19 '17 at 15:17
1

to finish this press ALT+-> several times (in my case it's 6 tty's so 6 times) until you get into the Ubuntu-Gnome login screen and login. – Roey May 19 '17 at 16:51
2

@Roey Also CTRL+ALT+F7 – cat May 19 '17 at 18:13
That didn't fix my problem, sadly. – Rafael_Espericueta Sep 10 '17 at 02:27
1

@rafael but did you also get the same error notice? Have a look at the .xsessions_errors file in your home – Rinzwind Sep 11 '17 at 06:46

Ravexina · Answer 2 · 2017-05-19T20:46:26.620

9

If you don't know what username/group you shoud use, I suggest using something like this:

sudo chown $USER:`id -gn` .Xauthority

edited May 19 '17 at 20:46

answered May 19 '17 at 15:53

Ravexina

1

Are you sure you don't mean `$USER:\`id -gn\`` (note the colon character in the middle)? Also, that would be equivalent to just `$USER:` since `chown` uses the primary group of the specified user if you omit the group name. – David Foerster May 19 '17 at 20:15
@DavidFoerster Both `:` and `.` will work fine, didn't know about omitting group like `$USER:`, good point +1 :-) – Ravexina May 19 '17 at 20:25
check `info coreutils` and the section which is about `chown`. I'll change it to `:` in case of username contains dot. – Ravexina May 19 '17 at 20:44
1

Indeed: “New scripts should avoid the use of \`.' because it is not portable […].” Looks like we both learned something today. :-] – David Foerster May 19 '17 at 20:47
Yeah, I just used it to show an alternative approach and it caused us to learn something new :) – Ravexina May 19 '17 at 20:48

2 Answers2