Question

5

chown -R user:user .* changes permissions backwards: is this the correct behaviour?

rated 0 times [ 5] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 55428 / 1 Year ago, wed, may 31, 2023, 10:51:43

I got into a lot of trouble when changing the permission of a folder myfolder residing in /.
I issued the command

sudo chown -R luca:luca /myfolder/.*

My intention was to change ownership of all the hidden files in /myfolder.

Unfortunately I realized that also the ownership of / was changed, which of course left me with a broken system. I think this happened because .. matches .*, but still seems weird to me.

Is changing the parent directory the correct behaviour or should I file a bug report?

If it was my mistake in using chown, what are the best practices to use to prevent changing the ownership of system folders and files?

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hreadsoplet

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2 Years ago

answered 1 Year ago attagjump · Accepted Answer

Remember that the command line is expanded (interpreted) by the shell before being executed

sudo chown -R luca:luca /myfolder/.*

is interpreted first as :

sudo chown -R luca:luca /myfolder/.  /myfolder/.. /myfolder/.adobe  /myfolder/.bash_history

note the /myfolder/.. in your command line

chown -R luca:luca /myfolder/.. is equivalent to chown -R luca:luca /

that makes the chown running "backwards"

Use echo /myfolder/.* when you use "*" to verify .