Duplicate accounts?

[inode0]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 1:12 PM, Armelius Cameron <armeliusc at 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 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.

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