Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 08:18:24 -0400 From: "Brian J. McGovern" <mcgovern@spoon.beta.com> To: lore@phile.com.au Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: Chaning a user's uid Message-ID: <199904291218.IAA44282@spoon.beta.com>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Now you know the joy of trying to change a user's UID, and why so many people discourage doing it. Anyhow, to change a users home directory, completely, the easiest method is to just: cd ~user chown -R user.group . That will change ownership on everything from the current directory down. If you don't want to modify . (most installations do let the user own their own directory), then something along the lines of cd ~user chown -R user.group * .[a-z]* .[A-Z]* should do what you want. However, also keep in mind that there may be files elsewhere in the system (like their mail spool) that needs to be changed as well. In this case, I suggest that you look at: chown user.group `find / -uname <olduid>` But, thats a pretty powerful command that will blindly go through the file tree and change ownerships on EVERYTHING owned by the original user. There are two immediately visable caveats. First, you might not want to do that. There may be files that used to be owned by this user that you don't want to change ownerships on (I'm at a loss for what, but there may be cases). Secondly, if there are too many files, the command will die with 'Too many arguments', and you'll have to look at xargs, or something, which is beyond the scope of me writing an email 10 minutes after I get out of bed. -Brian To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199904291218.IAA44282>