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Date:      Fri, 9 Jun 2000 00:19:09 +0530
From:      Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in>
To:        Meagan Jia Pi <meagan@e-lingo.com>
Cc:        questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: question about chown
Message-ID:  <20000609001909.A5699@physics.iisc.ernet.in>
In-Reply-To: <058f01bfd178$5c380880$e293c83f@meagan>; from meagan@e-lingo.com on Thu, Jun 08, 2000 at 11:35:45AM -0700
References:  <862568F8.0062581F.00@MCSMTP.MC.VANDERBILT.EDU> <058f01bfd178$5c380880$e293c83f@meagan>

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Meagan Jia Pi said on Jun  8, 2000 at 11:35:45:
> Greetings!
> 
> A friend of mine logged in as root and did this under some user's home
> directory:
> 
>     chown username .*
> 
> trying to change ownership of all the hidden files, but a disaster happened:
> he unintentionally
> changed ownership for all the users' home directory to this paticular user.
> 
> I understand the best way to do this is to go a directory above, and do
> "chown -R username",
> but I 'd like to find out why it happened that way.

Because the shorthand for the directory immediately below the
current directory is .. which got included in .*
So if he was in /home/me, .. meant /home, and everything in /home got
chown'ed.

R.


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