chown question

["Douglas A. Tutty" <dtutty@vianet.ca>]

Hello all,

I have a really basic question; I really messed up my box.

I was doing a reinstall on an old box after a drive failure.  I restored
/home but one of the UIDs were created differently so I needed to chown
their directory, including all the hidden files in their ~/.

Without thinking, as root I did a:

root@plot:/home/dtbrowser# chown -R dtbrowser.dtbrowser .*

Unfortunatly, no everyting on the box is owned by dtbrowser.  It walked
up the file tree (presumably via . and ..) and changed everything.

I know that I could have used find to look for all files owned by the
old UID, plunked it through xargs and chowned them that way, but is
there a way, as root, to chown directly the hidden files without
chowning the whole box?

Just for my future reference?

Thanks,

Doug.