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Accepted
john
Asked: 2012-04-10 13:08:50 +0800 CST

Can I change the ownership of all the files of a specific user?

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Is there a way to recursively find all files owned by a user and change them to another user/group in Gnu/Linux?

I assume there must be some magic one liner but my command line wizardry skills are not up to that :)

Thanks!

linux centos bash shell shell-scripting

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Use the find command with the -user option. Something like:

    find / -user john

    will eventually turn up all files owned by user "john".

    If you want to change their ownership (I would run the find without execution to make sure you have the list you want), then something like:

    find / -user john -exec chown harry {} \;

    will do it.

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  2. This is late, but today I stumbled across this question because my rsync doesn't have the --usermap option.

    My chown (v. chown (GNU coreutils) 8.13) offers a built-in recurse (-R) and a --from option so your (and my) problem could've also been solved using

    chown -R --from=john harry /

    More specifically I'm migrating a server from OpenSuse to debian, and the user and group of apache2 differ between the distributions. In OpenSuse its user wwwrun (id:30) and group www (id:8), in debian www-data (id: 33) for both. After I copied the files using

    rsync -az /path/to/files me@debian:/path/to/

    I used

    chown -R --from=30 33 /path/to/files/
chown -R --from=:8 :33 /path/to/files/

    on the target (debian) machine.

    Note: rsync version 3.1.0 protocol version 31 has the above mentioned --usermap so if I had that I could've done all three steps with one command on the source machine:

    rsync -az --usermap=30:33 --groupmap=8:33 /path/to/files root@debian:/path/to/
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