I did this once by accident (bad scripting, managed to abort it,) it wasn’t too bad until sudo told me that the sudoers file had the wrong owner. I then learnt that there are other ways to become root.
OS ran for another ~6months after I re chowned etc to root.
One time I introduced someone to Linux then left them to their own devices.
I returned to them hours later to find out they had gotten annoyed with permissions errors and run
chown -R ${THEIRUSER}: /
.The results were not what they wanted.
I did this once by accident (bad scripting, managed to abort it,) it wasn’t too bad until sudo told me that the sudoers file had the wrong owner. I then learnt that there are other ways to become root.
OS ran for another ~6months after I re chowned etc to root.
Wow. You were lucky. That abort might have been what saved you there.
A valuable lesson