Finding out a directory's previous permissions

Question

I have root access in my Linux environment. I have a directory 'officestaff'; this directory permissions were changed to 775 and the modification date changed. How can I know the previous permissions of that directory before modification?

I have tried history but it does not show any chmod on the directory.

Not unless you make special provisions, by storing the old permissions somewhere first, or by creating a backup or snapshot, for example.. — malyy, Jun 01 '16 at 13:15
unless you have auditing enabled on your system, there is no way to look back for the permissions or ownership of any file. Do you have auditing enabled on this system ? — MelBurslan, Jun 01 '16 at 14:08
sorry if i dont know the basic stuff , i am not aware of auditing , what is that? — gs rao, Jun 02 '16 at 14:07

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

Past permissions of files are not recorded by default. Unless you had taken steps to set up some form of logging before the change happened (a variant of Is it possible to find out what program or script created a given file?), this information is not available. And even then logging would only tell you what changed, not what was there before.

Even if you did find the command that changed the permissions in some history, that wouldn't tell you what the previous permissions were.

Unless you had set up a way to track permission history, the only place where the historical information is available is your backups.

Finding out a directory's previous permissions

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