chown question
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: r...@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. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: chown question
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. -- Chris Jackson -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: chown question
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: r...@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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: chown question
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? Just for my future reference? I found this suggestion from some message board* $ chown user:group .[!.]* That uses the shell pattern matching to exclude '..' by skipping any files whose second character is a dot. Unfortunately it will also skip any hidden files with names like '..filename' *http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447626+1246551046034+28353475threadId=966579 - Chris B -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: chown question
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 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? Instead of r...@plot:/home/dtbrowser# chown -R dtbrowser.dtbrowser .* do r...@plot:/home/dtbrowser# chown -R dtbrowser.dtbrowser /home/dtbrowser/.* [in one line] Cheers, Johannes -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkpM3xQACgkQC1NzPRl9qEW8wQCeMzJAwaoOYNmhw9Ue+2/MktrZ 8TwAn24qjU+bl7vypxSDDQpLk+4LVXDx =vIsj -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: chown question
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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: chown question
Johannes Wiedersich 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? Instead of r...@plot:/home/dtbrowser# chown -R dtbrowser.dtbrowser .* do r...@plot:/home/dtbrowser# chown -R dtbrowser.dtbrowser /home/dtbrowser/.* Hi Johannes, Wouldn't the shell still expand the argument list to include '/home/dtbrowser/..' and result in the same problem? - Chris B -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: chown question
Chris Burkhardt wrote: chown chrisj.chrisj ~chrisj That won't follow the .. link. Shouldn't that include the recursive flag? chown -R chrisj.chrisj ~chrisj Apologies, yes it should. -- Chris Jackson Shadowcat Systems Ltd. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
