Duplicate accounts?

[Armelius Cameron]

On Monday, February 28, 2011 10:53:34 pm inode0 wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Larry Brower <larry at 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. 

> 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