Re: chown fails to ignore symbolic links during recursive directory transversals

[Bob Proulx]

Mark Brand wrote:
> Moreover, there doesn't seem to be any way of invoking chown so that it
> operates recursively on a directory tree but ignores (doesn't follow)
> symbolic links.

Personally I would use find/xargs.  Like this:

> haydn:~ # mkdir sandbox
> haydn:~ # cd sandbox/
> haydn:~/sandbox # mkdir -p a/aa/aaa
> haydn:~/sandbox # touch foo
> haydn:~/sandbox # mkdir b
> haydn:~/sandbox # cd a/aa/aaa/
> haydn:~/sandbox/a/aa/aaa # ln -s ../../../foo foo
> haydn:~/sandbox/a/aa/aaa # ln -s ../../../b b
> haydn:~/sandbox/a/aa/aaa # cd ../../..
> haydn:~/sandbox # ls -l
> total 2
> drwxr-xr-x   4 root root  120 Mar  9 10:03 .
> drwx------  37 root root 2304 Mar  9 10:02 ..
> drwxr-xr-x   3 root root   72 Mar  9 10:03 a
> drwxr-xr-x   2 root root   48 Mar  9 10:03 b
> -rw-r--r--   1 root root    0 Mar  9 10:03 foo
> haydn:~/sandbox # chown -R nobody:users a

  find a -print0 | xargs -r0 chown nobody:users

Does that work as you desire?

Bob