Terminal Problem (10.6.8)

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My hard drive broke so I've been moving my files to a new one and the file permissions are messed up. I was looking for a command that edits the permissions of one folder and everything in said folder. I found two on another macforums thread (sudo chown -R User_name /Users/user_short_name and sudo chmod -R 777 /Users/user_short_name).

I tried the first one, and it asked for a password, and I tried to type but it wasn't appearing. I closed the window and tried the command again, and it didn't prompt me for a password. I checked if the permissions had changed, they didn't. I restarted and tried the commands again, neither prompted me of anything or changed the permissions.

I'm sorry if this isn't the correct spot.

EDIT:
I'm not the main administrator of this account although my account is an admin. When I restarted I went on the main admin account to type those commands and it didn't work. I'm not sure if I need to be on the account I'm targetting to make it work. I'm going to try that now.
 
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sudo will always require a password. You will also never see it typed (it doesn't echo to the screen), this is 100% normal operation. The password required is your users password. That said, how are you copying these over? Are you intending to replace your entire home directory?
 
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Those commands will effectively change the owner of that directory (chown) and then give everyone read/write/execute permissions (chmod 777). The syntax is correct as well as the password behavior as mentioned above.

Using the 777 mask is not a great idea, but for your purposes it might not matter, considering you probably don't care about correct permissions on the old drive.

Please consider copying files individually and not transferring over the complete home folder.
 
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Those commands will effectively change the owner of that directory (chown) and then give everyone read/write/execute permissions (chmod 777). The syntax is correct as well as the password behavior as mentioned above.

Using the 777 mask is not a great idea, but for your purposes it might not matter, considering you probably don't care about correct permissions on the old drive.

Please consider copying files individually and not transferring over the complete home folder.
I believe I've fixed it anyway. Thanks for replying.
 

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