On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 1:12 PM, Armelius Cameron <armeliusc(a)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(a)maxqe.com> wrote:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA512
> >
> > 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