On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 1:12 PM, Armelius Cameron armeliusc@gmail.com wrote:
On Monday, February 28, 2011 10:53:34 pm inode0 wrote:
On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Larry Brower larry@maxqe.com wrote:
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On 02/28/2011 07:47 AM, Alain Spineux wrote:
So I did SUDO -i, and from root as shell I tried to chown -hR * fcassia on the Desktop folder...
You must switch the star and our user name
chown -hR fcassia *
You should also avoid doing chown -R with just a * wildcard as this could possibly recursively follow ../ which would then try and change ownership on things you don't want changed.
Out of curiosity how can you configure bash to expand a simple * to include ..?
You can't. That's the point. The parent post is wrong. It would be totally insane for shell to expand * to include ../ Then any recursive operation on any directory level would also recurse up all the way up to / . That's absurd.
Yes, I am giving the parent poster a chance to show us how it is possible.
Of course recursive changes are always dangerous since there may be symlinks uncovered in the recursion pointing all over the place ...
If it's a symlink, the operation would happen to the symlink, not the file it's pointing too. I am not saying one should not be careful to use * and recursive, but it's also useful to know exactly what can and cannot happen.
Whether symlinks are followed recursively is a function of the program actually called recursively and often what options are used to call it. chown -HR foo * will on many systems for example try to change the ownership of files after traversing the matched symlinks.
John