I own a Samsung Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich). My phone is rooted and running a custom recovery (Clockworkmod Touch 5.8.0.2). I’m not sure if it’s been the case since I purchased the phone (and originally had the most recent non-touch version of Clockworkmod) or if it’s after upgrading to the touch version of CWM or if it’s as a result of me installing a custom ROM and just generally f—ing with my phone, but “Fix Permissions” doesn’t work from recovery any more. This wouldn’t be a big deal if I could run this from Rom Manager, however, my phone seems to stall every time I run this while Android is booted. It appears that it hangs while processing running applications, as every time it stalled I exited out of Fix Permissions (in Rom Manager), force closed the app it stalled on, then re-ran Fix Perms, and I’d make a little bit more progress, only to stall again on another app. Finally I FC’d enough apps that Fix Perms completed, but I had mixed feelings about the quality of the job I’d just performed.
When you run Fix Perms, the first line (helpfully) prints the script that is being run, which is “/data/data/com.koushikdutta.rommanager/files/fix_permissions”. Using this info, I attempted to boot into recovery and run the script manually from the ADB shell of my PC. Again, Fix Perms seemed to stall, only this time I knew it couldn’t be a running app that caused the issue (remember, I’m booted into recovery!). I issued an
“adb pull /data/data/com.koushikdutta.rommanager/files/fix_permissions”
to get a copy of the Fix Perms script on my computer and checked it out. It turns out that at the top of the script there is a big warning that states “Warning: if you want to run this script in cm-recovery change the above to #! /sbin/sh”. Fair enough. I changed the first line of the script to “#! /sbin/sh” and then pushed the script back to my phone using the following command:
“adb push fix_permissions /data/media”
I pushed the file to the “/data/media” directory instead of the original directory the file came from as that would have overwritten the original and not allowed it to run while Android is booted (not that it’s working anyway…). NOTE: The “/data/media” directory on the Galaxy Nexus is the virtual SD card (the GN doesn’t have removable media, so it tricks Android into thinking this directory is an SD card). If you’re using a different phone you’ll likely have to load the script into a different directory. It shouldn’t make a difference where you place the file, I just wouldn’t put it in the “/data/data” directory.
Once you’ve loaded the script onto your phone, set the proper executable permissions by issuing the command below. Remember to change the file path to wherever you placed the file.
“chmod +x /data/media/fix_permissions”
After that’s done, run the script by issuing:
“/data/media/fix_permissions”
The script should run and fix your file system permissions without stalling.