[solved]global command to change file owner?

[yonnie]

Using lxde mini 12.06.  I'm finding hundreds of files are owned by user 1000 and group 1000 on old another distro hdd.  I can't copy these to my new home directory on new hdd.  All of these files should be user 500 and group 500.

Switching from another distro 10.  Have many years worth of files that have somehow been given strange user/group ownership and can't get them off of the old drive and onto the new.

Is there a program suitable for this?  Or a global way of finding which files are wrong user and which are correct?

[aguila]

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su

chown -R 500:500 /dev/sdX/*
This will change every file and directory's owner and group to 500.

Verify the path to your he'd. Could be /dev/hda/ if it's an IDE drive or /media/name-of-the-drive if it's a portable hdd.

After typing "su" hit return and enter your root password.

Do at your own risk. Try a single file first.

[Bald Brick]

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su

chown -R 500:500 /dev/sdX/*
This will change every file and directory's owner and group to 500.

Verify the path to your he'd. Could be /dev/hda/ if it's an IDE drive or /media/name-of-the-drive if it's a portable hdd.

After typing "su" hit return and enter your root password.

Do at your own risk. Try a single file first.

The command as given won't work. You'll get the error message "chown: cannot access `/dev/sdX/*': Not a directory". But

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chown -R 500:500 /media/<name-of-the-partition>/* will work.

In other words, "chown" can't access devices like /dev/sda and /dev/sdb directly. The partition you want to run it on must be mounted, and after that you must specify the path to the mountpoint, not the path to the device node.

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chown -R 500:500 /home/<username>/<myfiles>/*is OK. But actually you don't need the asterisk with the -R option.

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chown -R 500:500 /home/<username>/<myfiles> will work as well.

[aguila]

Hi Bald Brick.

Thanks for the correction. Never needed it so far, so I didn't know its limits. No asterisk needed with the -R option, good to know.

So, in one line

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mount /dev/sdX /home/mymame/old-hdd && chown -R 500:500 /home/myname/old-hdd?

[Bald Brick]

Hi Bald Brick.

Thanks for the correction. Never needed it so far, so I didn't know its limits. No asterisk needed with the -R option, good to know.

So, in one line

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mount /dev/sdX /home/mymame/old-hdd && chown -R 500:500 /home/myname/old-hdd?

Almost. You should not try to mount the whole drive /dev/sdX; you should mount the partitions on it, /dev/sdXn. (If there's only one partition on the drive, n will be 1.)

Also note that the mountpoint has to exist before you manually can mount anything on it, so if /home/myname/old-hdd doesn't, you should create a subdirectory called old-hdd in /home/myname first:

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mkdir -p /home/<username>/old-hdd
(In this case the -p option is not really necessary.)

When you let the system mount removable media or other partitions semi-automatically under /media it creates the mountpoints on the fly. When you do the mounting yourself the mountpoints have to exist before you can do it.



And then there's actually a tiny difference between

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chown -R 500:500 /home/myname/old-hddand

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chown -R 500:500 /home/myname/old-hdd/*
The first command will change the owner and group of the old-hdd folder and everything in it; the second will change owner and group of everything in the folder but not of the folder itself.

[yonnie]

I used Bald Brick's command and changed 1 directory at a time.  Just the ones I want to keep.  So far so good.

Thanks!

[aguila]

Thank you Bald Brick, learned a lot today.

I'm happy it helped, yonnie