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Stuart Woodward
Asked: 2012-03-30 02:02:17 +0800 CST

On linux how can make a list of files that are owned by a particular owner and then fix the group and owner?

  • 772

I have a deep and complex file system where some files have been accidently written by root. I want to change the ownership of those files back to the original owner in one go.

I am playing with commands like:

find /folder -type f | xargs ls -l | grep "root root"

but there is a lot of garbage coming out too.

I want to make a list first and then change only the files in that list after confirmation.

linux redhat find

3 Answers

  1. find /folder -type -f -uid 0

    will find all files under the directory owned by root, -user root would also work, naturally.

    If all files below /folder should be owned by the same user/group, you could simply do an recursive chown: 

    chown -R user:group /folder
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  2. Use 

    find /folder -uid 0 >/tmp/root.files

    to get a list of files owned by root. Once you have reviewed the list you could use

    while read file 
do
    chown user:group "$file"

done </tmp/root.files
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  3. As in the other answers use find with either -uid 0 or -user root to find files belonging to root. Then use the -execaction:

    find /folder -type f -uid 0 -exec chown root:root {} \;

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