Re: [Help-bash] How to safely work on files/dirs with .

[Bob Proulx]

David Niklas wrote:
> The other day I tried to change the perms of the files in a temporary home
> dir as root with
> % chown -R test:test /home/test/.*

Only the dot files?  Not all of the files?  Why not all of the files?

> After noting that it was taking more then a few seconds I killed the
> command

Since "*" matches "." that ".*" also matched "..".  Having matched
".." it was recursing down the entire /home directory.  I am assuming
you have repaired that problem already by setting the other directory
ownerships back to what they needed to be already.

> and then used the path that I gave chown to ls and got the
> following output:
> % ls /home/test/.*

Better would have been:

  ls -d /home/test/.* | less

> This is not what I wanted to access. I only want to change the file owner
> in my test user's home dir.
> How do I do this safely?

Use find for this.  It is perfect.

  find /home/test/ -exec chown test:test {} +

But if you really want to use 'chown -R' then just using it by itself
is fine.  Just don't use any shell wildcards.

  chown -R test:test /home/test/

If you want the bash way for matching characters that are not a dot:

  chown -R test:test /home/test/.[!.]*

You can test the match out using 'ls' before running the chown.

  ls -d /home/test/.[!.]* | less

Bob