Re: chown question

[Chris Burkhardt <chris@mretc.net>]

Chris Jackson wrote:
> Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
> 
>> 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?
> 
> 
> The simplest way would be to recursively chown the home directory:
> 
> chown chrisj.chrisj ~chrisj
> 
> That won't follow the .. link.

Shouldn't that include the recursive flag?

chown -R chrisj.chrisj ~chrisj

Otherwise it just changes the owner of the directory and not all the
files in it.

And here are a couple of other flags from the chown(1) manpage which render
chown a less dangerous command:

--from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP
change the owner and/or group of each file only if its current owner
and/or group match those specified here.  Either may be omitted, in
which case a match is not required for the omitted attribute.

--preserve-root
fail to operate recursively on /

- Chris B