From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Apr 28 14:23:47 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from names.phile.com.au (philli.lnk.telstra.net [139.130.44.202]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 92012154E4 for ; Wed, 28 Apr 1999 14:23:41 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from lore@phile.com.au) Received: from ibmmx200.phile.com.au (ibmmx200.phile.com.au [203.35.202.130] ) by names.phile.com.au (Hethmon Brothers Smtpd) ; Thu, 29 Apr 1999 07:22:41 +1000 Message-Id: <199904290722.4136247.6@names.phile.com.au> From: "loren" To: "freebsd-questions@freebsd.org" Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 07:23:40 +1100 (EDT) Reply-To: "loren" X-Mailer: PMMail 2.00.1500 for OS/2 Warp 4.00 In-Reply-To: <199904281604.MAA73639@bellsouth.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: Changing a user's UID Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Thanks to all who contributed. The problem was that I was just canging the /etc/passwd and /etc/master.passwd files manually and not updating the database. After hearing of vipw and reading man pages, voila! No more problems! Well almost no more. I did intend to use "chown" to change the ownerships but I'm getting some rather unusal results when there are symbolic links involved, and in changing the dot files in the root of the user's home directory. eg. If I "cd ~username" then "chown --recursive username:groupname *", the dot files (like .profile or .cshrc) don't change ownership to the new UID. No probs, so I do a "chown -R uname:gname .*" and the files change OK, but so does the ownership of the /home directory. eeek! and If I do a "chown -R uname:gname *", the files in every other user's directory under the /home file system changes as well! Is there any info around with a fuller explanation of the options of the chown command for a newbie other than the man pages? Cheers Phillip To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message