Re: chown question

[Mark Allums <mark@allums.com>]

Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
> 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.

That's the most awesome global file oopsie I've heard of in a long time!

I think I would probably have used ~ instead of * in some way.  Or, 
named more of the full path, and depended a little less on the wildcard.

Anything combining a * with a . is usually asking for trouble, I've found.

Gives me the willies just thinking about it.

Mark Allums