chown question

[dandan123]

I would like to change the owner of a bunch of files from one person to another.

chown -R will change all files which I do not want to do, I want to only change ownership from user A to user B.

How do I do this ?

TIA

 

[kHz]

man find

 

[Annihilannic]

If you want to change the ownership of some files rather than recursively changing the ownership of a directory an it's contents (i.e. -R), just use:

[tt]chown newowner file1 file2 file3 ...[/tt]

Annihilannic.

 

[dandan123]

annihilannic,

There are a lot of files and subdirectories and some of the files have different owners which I do not want to change.

 

[SamBones]

Like kHz said, [tt]man find[/tt].

find /startdir -user olduser -exec chown newuser {} \; -print

The "[tt]-print[/tt]" isn't needed, it's just there so you can see which files were changed.

 

[mrn]

Found this script

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Make sure this is being run by root. Otherwise, all of the chowns
# are likely to fail
if ($< != 0)
{       print "fixowner must be run with root permissions. Try running\n";
        print "it with sudo.\n";
        print "\n";
        exit -1;
}

if (@ARGV < 3)
{       print "USAGE: fixowner olduid shortname dirtofix\n";
        print "where  olduid is the old UID of the changed user\n";
        print "       shortname is the short username of the changed user\n";
        print "       dirtofix is the directory tree that you want to fix\n";
        print "\n";
        exit -1;
}

$olduser = $ARGV[0];
$newuser = $ARGV[1];
@newuserpw = getpwnam($newuser);
if (@newuserpw == 0)
{       printf "No such user: $newuser\n";
        exit -1;
}

$newuid = $newuserpw[2];
$start = $ARGV[2];

open (LIST, "find \"$start\" -user $olduser \! -path \"/dev/*\" |") ||
        die "Can't pipe in find results\n";

while (<LIST>)
{       ($file) = /(.*)\n$/;
        chown $newuid, -1, $file;
        print "$file\n";
}

may help

Mike

"A foolproof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble, then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant."

http://www.airport-parking-site.co.uk/

 

[WhiteVolg]

Sambones is correct. find is the most effective way to do it.

 

[dandan123]

Thanks for all the responses.