Emergency UNIX and Linux Support

Hi.

I've had a little mishap.

To cut a long story short, I've accidentally recursively ran chown on a directory (actually a bunch of 'em). Not a problem in itself, but I had a slight error in the code I used to get the list of directories and ended up with a comment in the file ownership.

For example, I now have directories full of stuff like:

Code:

$ ll php
total 40
drwxr-xr-x   4 # Scott -  staff    136  3 Oct 12:37 .
drwxr-xr-x  14 root   system    476  5 Oct 16:24 ..
-rw-------   1 # Scott - staff  12288  3 Oct 12:39 .swp
-rwxr--r--   1 # Scott -  staff   4817  3 Oct 10:14 test.php

And I can't seem to find a way to change it back.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks.

Was the # part of your command line?
Where are you the tree in on what you show us just above? ( root of any filesystem?)

OK, the longer version

A while ago I was asked to remove some users from a production system. Rather than removing them I commented them out in /etc/passwd

i.e.

Code:

# Scott - removed 16.09.12 - userX:*:12345:45678.....

I also removed a symbolic link in /home to the actual home directory, and renamed the actual home directory to something else (i.e. /app/some/dir/prod/userX_DELETEME).

This was handy because a few days later I was asked to put some of the users back!

It's quite a few users so I thought I would write a script to do it recreate the link and rename the directories.

I've generated code to grab the username from the /etc/password but somehow got "# Scott" instead, and for reasons unbeknown seem to have run chown -R on the directory using "# Scott" as the owner, instead of the username.

I'm not quite sure why I ran chown but I have, and now I have a whole bunch of home directories which, when listed, show the owner as "#Scott -". ls -ln.

I thought that file ownership is just a user ID number, which you can see using ls -ln

Hi scott, do you remember whaat you typed? (hehe so I can corrupt my machine also...)
I cant recreate the situation so difficult to give any suggestion for now...

So what you are seeing is in fact the UID translated from /etc/passwd then ?

Yes, I agree, it's seeing # Scott from the /etc/passwd as the userid of the UID lookup from that file.

If you know the root userid password and can login as God then you should be able to change ownership of any files (single or recursive) by using a UID only, for example:

Code:

 
chown 3645 <filename>

The 3645 should appear in /etc/passwd as a valid UID of a user.

(You could change it to any UID number of your choice (not a valid user) but this may give you denied access later (which is what you've already done).

Login as God, use chown with a UID that matches up to a user in /etc/passwd.