How to remove ACL from a directory and back to usual access control?

Question

We use a hosting server of FreeBSD 10.3, where we don't have the authority to be a superuser. We use the server to run apache2 for web pages of our company. The previous administrator of our web pages appeared to set an ACL permission to a directory, but we want to remove it. Let us say the directory is called foobar.

Now the result of ls -al foobar is as follows:

drwxrwxr-x+   2 myuser  another_user   512 Nov 20  2013 foobar

And the permission is as follows:

[myuser@hosting_server]$ getfacl foobar
# file: foobar/
# owner: myuser
# group: another_user
user::rwx
group::rwx
mask::rwx
other::r-x

Here we want to remove the ACL permission and the plus sign at the last of the permission list. Therefore, we did

setfacl -b foobar

It eliminated the special permission governed by the ACL, but didn't erase the plus sign+.

Our question is how can we erase the plus sign+ in the permission list, shown by 'ls -al foobar'?

Answer 1

Our problem was resolved by using:

setfacl -bn foobar

The point was we also had to remove the aclMask from the directory with an option -n... The man page of setfacl says as follows:

 -n      Do not recalculate the permissions associated with the ACL mask
         entry.  This option is not applicable to NFSv4 ACLs.

We're not sure why this option worked, but it did...

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In case you get d????????? permission after the above solution, try chmod -R a+rX as two commented below.

Answer 2

You should try using recursive option.

setfacl -R -b foobar

There is no need for -n option