Re: Redhat to Debian: migrating a multi-user server

[Chris Gray <cgray@tribsoft.com>]

>>>>> Ethan Benson writes:

    eb> if you extract the home directories after creating the new user
    eb> accounts they should get the new ownership properly as GNU tar is
    eb> fairly smart about this sort of thing. 

Actually, a tar file (according to POSIX) can have the uid only
represented as a number.  So tar will extract the archive using the
old permissions.  The obvious solution would be a chown -R, but that
might not be good if the users have other people's files.  Once again,
find comes to the rescue.

# find . -uid 500 | xargs chown 1000.1000 

Of course, you should modify it so that you're sure that it works, but
you get the idea.  You could set up a script and run it in /home/ that
does something like this and then everyone's files get the right
permissions.  

-- 
Chris