Tiny Core Linux

General TC => Programming & Scripting - Unofficial => Topic started by: bigpcman on August 25, 2011, 06:00:24 PM

Title: How to chown of all files except those owned by root ?
Post by: bigpcman on August 25, 2011, 06:00:24 PM

Is there a simple way to recursively change the owner of all the files in a directory  except for those owned by root?

Title: Re: How to chown of all files except those owned by root ?
Post by: bigpcman on August 25, 2011, 06:25:57 PM

Nervermind, this should work as long as all the non-root files have the same user name.

Code: [Select]

sudo find . -user username -exec chown newuser {} \;


Title: Re: How to chown of all files except those owned by root ?
Post by: wget on August 25, 2011, 06:35:40 PM

Code: [Select]

sudo find . ! -user username -exec chown newuser {} \;just add a "!".
tinycore is so tiny that his busybox did not mention about some useful opt.
or you can try

Code: [Select]

sudo find . -not -user username -exec chown newuser {} \;

Title: Re: How to chown of all files except those owned by root ?
Post by: maro on August 25, 2011, 06:44:37 PM

Here are some more generic "musings" about this subject (as I initially understood it to be less specific):

It's pretty simple combining 'find' (and it's '-user ...' test in a negated form) with 'xargs' (i.e. the command as the '-exec' action can be somewhat limiting depending on the intended operation), plus the command you like to apply to all found items, e.g.

Code: [Select]

tc@box:~$ find /dev ! -user root | xargs ls -l
crw--w----    1 tc       staff     136,   0 Aug 25 09:41 /dev/pts/0
crw--w----    1 tc       staff       4,   0 Aug 24 22:23 /dev/tty0
crw-------    1 tc       staff       4,   1 Aug 25 09:39 /dev/tty1
crw--w----    1 tc       staff       4,   2 Aug 24 22:23 /dev/tty2Which just lists (i.e. via 'ls -l') all objects under '/dev' that are not (hence the '!') owned by 'root'.

A few more points of possible interest: (1) If you want to limit the objects to purely files you'll need to add '-type f' in the tests part of the 'find' command. (2) If the "operation" applied to the items (i.e. 'ls -l' in aboves case) does not handle multiple items at once you'll need to add the '-n 1' parameter to 'xargs'.

So both these points applied to aboves case would lead to
   find /dev ! -user root -type f | xargs -n 1 ls -l

For more details I 'd suggest to "RTFM" (e.g. here (http://linux.die.net/man/1/find) and here (http://linux.die.net/man/1/xargs)), bearing in mind that the BusyBox applets of those two commands are not "feature complete". That means that in more "special" cases the 'findutils.tcz' extension will be required. Or in a case of a limitation of just the 'xargs' applet (e.g. not supporting the very useful '-I' option) a shell loop would do the trick (albeit the '-exec' action of 'find' might work as well).