Need help to set right ownerships

[Lazaro.Salem@rf.no]

Hi, 
Anybody can help me, please?  I really need to be sure how to fix this.
Logged as root I did: 

# cd /home/lds ; chown -R lds.users * ; ls -laR | more

and noticing that I forgot to change the ownership of the (hidden) dot files
I typed: 

# chown -R lds:users ~/.*

Uchhhh!  the `*' expands to `.' among others. By the time I noticed my two 
mistakes and pressed CTRL-C, I had already changed the ownership of /root, 
/home, and some subdirs in /var and /usr.

I saved on a floppy a list (find $dir -exec ls -laR {} \; | grep "lds      
users") with $dir set to /usr and /var. I fixed the ownerships of /root and 
/home by hand and the I typed  

# shutdown -r now

That was not very clever :-( but I was thinking of fixing everything when having
more time, from an emergency base system I have on a separate 16MB partition.
I am not quite  sure how to deal with the files in /var which are written at 
boot time ... ooops! and at shutdown tooo! :-( 
Maybe it help to mention that I have /, /var, /usr, /usr/local and /home (and 
swap) on separate partitions.

Right now I know which files have the wrong ownership but do not know what 
should be the right one. I thought of setting the ownership to root:root to the 
files in the list and then fix by hand those who shoud be owned by other system 
group (news, mail,...etc).  I think that then I should proceed by fixing file by
file, i.e., 
0)Fixing those in /var/lib/dpkg (any pointer about how to do it?)
1)removing all installed packages except those flaged as essential (base), 
2)comparing file by file with a fresh Debian 1.1.x base system (I have one).
3)Reinstalling again the packages.

Any suggestion to make it as safer/cleaner/greener/faster as possible will be 
greatly appreciated. A script maybe to do it automatically?'
I am not suscribed to the list right now so please answer this to 
my private e-mail. Thank you very much,

Lazaro <salem@rf.no>