* blowing up in your face.

[James Wilkinson]

max bianco wrote:
> If i read him right then the hidden files and such aren't getting the
> right owner/group. I think its just the way the * is exapanded in the
> shell.
> he should have used *.*

PLEASE take more care when making recommendations!

Fortunately, it won’t work. It will match any file with a dot somewhere
in the middle.

Why is that fortunate? If you had recommended
chown -R .*
the shell would have expanded that to
chown -R . .. (and so on)
and would have chowned all files under the parent directory (assuming it
was run as root).

If you’re in a user’s home directory, then this would change the
ownership of all files in all home directories on the machine.

I once had a colleague do a
cd /home
chmod 777 * .*
on an AIX machine. That changed all the permissions on all files on the
machine. Eventually we had to reinstall. (These days I could have done
something with a shell script and a backup log…)

Personally, I’d recommend
chown -R user:group /home/user
i.e. do it on the directory itself, not all the files underneath it.

Hope this helps,

James.

-- 
E-mail:     james@ | Telsa ruthlessly depopulates the cuddly toy pile. There
aprilcottage.co.uk | is only room for so many penguins in any one house. Alan
                   | wakes. Telsa throws cuddly toys down the stairwell. Alan
                   | is struck by a blinding flash of penguin.
                   |     -- Telsa Gwynne’s Diary.