Change Files Ownership

[Yap Yen Nee]

Let's say, under 1 directory, I have a lot of files and all these files owned by different user. What is the command i should use to change the ownership of all the files owned by user1 to user2?

I know that we can use chown user2 filename but i guess this only apply to 1 file at a time, right? How can I change the ownership of multiple files together?

Thank you.

[MarkSyder]

If you want all the files in the directory to be owned by user2 it's simple:

chown user2 *

and, if you have any files that start with .,

chown user2 .*

Mark Syder (like the drink but spelt different)

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi,

Use 'find' command with '-user' switch.

find . -user user1 |xargs chown user2

-Sri

[Duncan Edmonstone · Accepted solution]

Whoa careful there Mark!

running:

chown user2 .*

as root doesn't just change the ownership of any files beginning with a period (like .profile or .exrc) to user2. It ALSO changes the ownership of the current directory (.) AND the parent directory (..) to user2 - if this a users home area you could end up changing the ownership of the /home directory such that no-one apart from user2 can log in!

I speak from bitter experience on this (ran it on a production system with lots of users).

HTH

Duncan

[Laurent Menase]

chown -R user2 thedirectory
or
find thedirectory -exec chown user2 {} \;

If you want to change only the file owned by user1:
find thedirectory -user user 1 -exec chown user2 {} \;

[MarkSyder]

Thanks for that word of warning Duncan.

I'd give you points, but it's not my thread!

Mark

[Nguyen Anh Tien]

Find command give you solution for this and previous question
#find /directory -user Username -print|xargs chown username:groupname