Chown multiple dot files

[Coolmar]

Hi,

Is there a way to chown multiple dot files in a directory? Obviously, chown .* is not the way to go, but I am tired of chowing each and every dot file in a directory.

Thanks,
S

[Ranjith_5]

Hi Sally,

can we have

# chown -R owner:group


Regards,
Syam

[Alan Meyer_4 · Accepted solution]

find . -type f -name '.*' -prune -exec owner:group {} \;

[Coolmar]

That does all the regular files but not the dot files (ie: .profile, .dt, .abc, etc)

[Mel Burslan]

chown XXX .[a-z,A-Z,0-9]*

this will change the ownership of most every dot file in a given directory.

[Alan Meyer_4]

oops

find . -type f -name '.*' -prune -exec chown owner:group {} \;

[Andy Torres]

They're usually the first files in a long listing ("ll"). If you know how many there are, try this:

ll | grep -v total | head -7 | awk '{print $9}'

The 7 would be the number of files in the directory that you want.

You can put that into a for-do loop or a maybe an xargs pipe.

Not so elegant, but I hope that helps.

[Coolmar]

Thanks Alan

[Alan Meyer_4]

NOTE:
It will also chown the . files in subdirectories downstream from the current directiory.

[Mel Burslan]

one caveat for Alan's command:

as .. (i.e. the upper directory) is found as a result of the find command, it may try to change the ownership of the files in the directory above which may wreak havoc in certain cases.

[Alan Meyer_4]

My tests of the included find command show that it does not go to the parent directory, but it does travel down the subdirectories below.

[Bill Hassell]

Let regexp do the work for you (find is not necessary). You already know that .* will match . and .. (not good!) so just tell regexp to not include a match if the second character is a dot:

chown user1:group2 .[!.]*

As with any sweeping command using filename matching, always verify the results with a preview:

echo chown user1:group2 .[!.]*

Oops. This will not match . or .. but it does match directories and that might not be desired. In that case, use find to locate only files.