Question

6

Why can't I set group and ownership of one folder without afffecting the other?

rated 0 times [ 6] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 3791 / 1 Year ago, tue, may 2, 2023, 5:34:56

I've upgraded an Ubuntu PC from 10.04 to 12.04.

Problem is all the permissions were wrong on the home folders.

So, I did the following:

sudo chown -R james:james /home/james/*

sudo chown -R james:james /home/james/.*

sudo chown -R htpc:htpc /home/htpc/*

sudo chown -R htpc:htpc /home/htpc/.*

But you end up with all the files in both folders either in james:james or htpc:htpc, depending on which way round you run the commands.

How have the become linked and how can I fix it?

As requested:

james@htpc:~$ ls -l /home

total 8

drwxr-xr-x 41 james james 4096 May 20 19:32 htpc

drwxr-xr-x 31 james james 4096 May 20 20:04 james

james@htpc:~$ ls -l /home/htpc

total 236

drwxr-xr-x  4 james james   4096 Nov 25 13:19 Desktop

drwxr-xr-x  2 james james   4096 Mar 13  2011 Documents

drwxr-xr-x  5 james james   4096 Dec 22  2010 Downloads

-rw-r--r--  1 james james    179 Nov 18  2010 examples.desktop

-rwxr-xr-x  1 james james     85 Dec 27  2010 goback

-rw-r--r--  1 james james    425 Nov 28  2010 modelines

drwxr-xr-x  5 james james   4096 Dec 27  2010 Music

drwxr-xr-x 22 james james   4096 Oct 29  2012 Pictures

drwxr-xr-x  2 james james   4096 Nov 18  2010 Public

drwxr-xr-x  2 james james   4096 Nov 18  2010 Templates

-rwxr-xr-x  1 james james    251 Dec 27  2010 testmode

drwxr-xr-x  2 james james   4096 Dec 23  2010 Videos

-rwxr-xr-x  1 james james 190672 Nov  6  2010 winetricks

james@htpc:~$

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rinstracte

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2 Years ago

answered 1 Year ago terose · Accepted Answer

It is because the shell is expanding the ".*" to be ".." or up one directory.

In this case it is best, IMO, to use find

Become root

sudo -i

run find

find /home/$user -exec chown $user:$user {} ;

Change $user to the appropriate user name

In theory, chown should work with the -R and without the wildcard

sudo chown -R $user:$user /home/$user

but I think this misses the hidden or .files, which is why RoboJ1M tried ".*" which caused the problem.