Hi grandma
... So I copied them back - whew - with a suduski cp -r command and now they are all owned by ROOT ...
Is that supposed to be sudo ? If you are gonig to ask for help,
show the commands exactly as you entered them.Frankly, I had no idea what you meant. But then again, I don't expect people to replace parts of commands with
words they made up because they think it's clever.
The command you wanted was (assuming you actually need to use sudo):
sudo cp -a
You can find out what that means just by asking:
tc@E310:~$ busybox cp --help
BusyBox v1.29.3 (2018-12-19 15:29:37 UTC) multi-call binary.
Usage: cp [OPTIONS] SOURCE... DEST
Copy SOURCE(s) to DEST
-a Same as -dpR
-R,-r Recurse
-d,-P Preserve symlinks (default if -R)
-L Follow all symlinks
-H Follow symlinks on command line
-p Preserve file attributes if possible
-f Overwrite
-i Prompt before overwrite
-l,-s Create (sym)links
-T Treat DEST as a normal file
-u Copy only newer files
tc@E310:~$