Scripting - Changing ownership of files

[Robin King_1]

Oh scripting gurus...

I have a large number of users (>100) on one of my systems that produce a lot of mail, that they have no need for, and don't housekeep. I've therefore created a .forward file for each of these users, to redirect the mail to /dev/null. I've just realised though, I think the .forward file must be owned by the user, in order for it to work.

Could someone suggest a way of chowning the files to match the owner of the directory in which they reside?

Thanks

[Geoff Wild]

for i in `ls -ld /home/* |awk '{print $3}'`
do
chown $i /home/$i/.forward
done


Rgds...Geoff

[Franky_1]

Hi Robin,

i could think of the following :

for i in `ls /home`
do
echo $i
cd $i
chown $i .forward
cd ..
done

Regards

Franky

[Muthukumar_5]

We can do as,

# new owner
newowner="new"
for file in `find / -name ".forward"`
do

if [[ $(ls -l $file | awk '{ print $3 }') = "owner" ]]
then

chown $newowner $file

fi

done



HTH.

[Rangarajan Radhakrishna]

(option to ls below is the number 1 not the letter "l", the other option id "d")

ls -1d /home/* | awk -F/ '{print "chown $NF " $0 "/.forward"}' > /tmp/chg_own.sh

(Eyeball the list for correctness)

Then:
sh /tmp/chg_own.sh

This way you will have a record of what you did.

[Muthukumar_5]

We can do this one line as,

find / -name ".forward" -exec ll {} \; | awk '{ if ( $3 == "user" ) print "chown " $9 }' | sh

[Sundar_7 · Accepted solution]

Not going by the assumption that user's home directory is in /home, I would try something like this

logins | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -n1 | while read USER
do
GRP=$(groups $USER | awk '{print $1}')
chown ${USER}:${GRP} ~${USER}/.forward
done

Sounds good ?

[Robin King_1]

Spot on Sundar, that worked perfectly for what I was looking to do, as I have home directories all over the place.

[Peter Nikitka]

Please keep in mind, that Sundars 'global' solution requires additional priveleges, if Home directories are NFS-mounted (root-access).

mfG Peter

[Sundar_7]

Peter - It is implied that Robin has enough privileges since he was able to create .forward file in the first place.