On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 02:26:43PM +0000, Morgan Read wrote:
> So, it seems that
> # find / -user 1002 -execdir chown 1003 '{}' \;
> Didn't perform as I expected...Starting that from / is horrifying. I would have started from /home, and then if you suspect you have other files outside of /home that need handling, I would have done those by hand. (Crontabs come to mind. You may need to chown some crontabs, if your users have those. Also inboxes in /var/mail if you use that, which I don't, but which is the "standard" in Debian.) Running that command starting from root means you're going to descend into /proc and /sys and /run and I can't even *guess* what will happen if you start chowning files inside those places. In addition to starting from somewhere other than / you could change the \; to + for efficiency. Apart from all that, what did it do which was different from your expectation? Or was the behavior so enigmatic that you couldn't even *tell* what it broke? If that's the case, I suspect something in those magic places (/proc or /sys or /run) got broken. > I was attempting to modify > # for i in `find / -user 1001`; do chown 3001 $i; done Dear gods. That violates at least two *major* rules of the shell. In fact, one of those is Bash Pitfall #1 on my list. Whoever wrote that command has no business writing shell commands, and *definitely* shouldn't be running shell commands as root.
