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.
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.
AC