What are these weird permissions? ==> d????????? ? ? ?? Since my Mac crashed and does not boot OS X at the moment, I am trying to recover some data from my user folder in OS X from within of Ubuntu.

Usually I have no problem accessing the files. But not this time.

I have stumbled upon these really strange permissions and I cannot change them. What are these?

Using sudo chmod... and sudo chown... is not possible and I get a message saying: (translated) no access possible: input/output error



d????????? ? ?    ?     ?            ? matthias
When you don't have permission to a folder in Ubuntu (and various other Linux OSs), you will get d?????????.

To recursively fix the permissions, use this command:

chmod -R a+rX matthias


From this answer on Ask Ubuntu:


  To read a file, its read permission needs to be set. However, to read a directory and the listing of its files, both the read and the execute permissions need to be set. If they aren't, you get weird errors like the ones you're experiencing.