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:

$ 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

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

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...

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.

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

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

Yes.

OMG. I have never seen this before.

When I added the users back, I copied them and removed the comment.

I just removed the commented line for one of them and it looks OK.

How could I never have seen this before?

ROFL. That was a waste of 20,000 bits!

Thanks