Fixes That Undo Themselves

The fix that does not stick

You run the command. The report gives you the points. You restart, and they are gone. Something else is putting the old setting back.

The /tmp folder

/tmp is a shared scratch folder that everyone can write to, which is on purpose. The risk is that being able to write to a folder also means being able to delete things in it, including other people's files.

There is a setting that fixes exactly that, and you can see it at the end of the permissions:

ls -ld /tmp

  drwxrwxrwt   /tmp      ← ends with t. Correct.
  drwxrwxrwx   /tmp      ← ends with x. Anyone can delete anyone's files.

Set it:

sudo chmod +t /tmp

Why that might not be enough

There is a folder of instructions that gets applied at every restart:

ls /etc/tmpfiles.d/

If a file in there describes /tmp with the wrong permissions, it puts them back every time the machine starts. Your chmod was real. It lasted until the restart.

sudo nano /etc/tmpfiles.d/FILENAME    # read it
sudo rm /etc/tmpfiles.d/FILENAME      # if it is the culprit, remove it

Do that first, then set the permission. In the other order the fix gets undone.

The restart test

It is the only way to know your work stuck:

sudo reboot

Log back in, open the Scoring Report, and compare it to the number you had before. Anything that vanished was never really fixed.

Try it yourself

ls -ld /tmp              # does it end with a t?
ls /etc/tmpfiles.d/      # anything in here?