Help with script to chown of home directory

[Matthew Couper]

I am having a hard time with effectively listing all the home directories on the system and changing the owner to the associated user. Prior to starting the administrator gave the ownership to root and made all home directories with 777 permission.

I would like to change this, any ideas on a script that would work. I attempted to just do an ls -d -l -t | awk '{print $9}'; cut -c 7-15

However, I can't figure out the best way to get this setup and work with the chown $1 $1.

I am not to sure how to approach this, any ideas?

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Matthew:

This should do what you want:

#!/usr/bin/sh
for D in `ls -ld /home/*|awk '{print $NF}'`
do
chown -R ${D} ${D##*/}:users
done
exit 0

Regards!

...JRF...

[Doug O'Leary · Accepted solution]

Hey;

awk -F: '$3 > 100 {printf("%s %d %s\n", $1, $4, $6)}' /etc/passwd | while read user gid home
do
chown ${user}:${gid} ${home}
done

You could also do a chown -R; however, that'd be a little riskier. I'd suggest echoing the command in the loop above out (echo chown...) to see which home directories and users are getting changed before looking at the -R option.

The $3 > 100 *should* prevent you from changing the ownership of any system related files/directories.

HTH;

Doug

[Matthew Couper]

#!/usr/bin/sh
for D in `ls -ld /home/*|awk '{print $NF}'`
do
chown -R ${D} ${D##*/}:users
done
exit 0

----- very close thanks

#!/usr/bin/sh
for D in `ls -ld /home/*|awk '{print $NF}'`
do
chown -R ${D##*/}:users ${D}
done
exit 0

--- this worked

[Matthew Couper]

BTW I did remove the Recursive chown portion.

[Matthew Couper]

I did remove the recursive portion, thanks Doug