Shell Programming and Scripting

Your shell man page should document the steps taken to parse a command, although it may be dense and terse. Experimentation usually helps fill in the blanks. If not, you can always ask us.

Should it be of interest, here's a portable solution that should handle any filename:

Code:

find /dump -group 200 \( -type f -o -type d -o -type l \) -exec sh -c '
    for f; do
        chgrp -vh $(ls -lnd "$f" | awk "NR==1 {print \$3; exit}") "$f"
    done
' sh {} +

Most importantly, note that awk has been restricted to only the first line of output. If there is indeed a possibility of a filename having newlines, then uid is only the third field of the first line; the third field of subsequent lines will be some part of the multiline filename.

Also, I changed -gid to -group, which is more portable. However, it works slightly differently. At first it tries to lookup a group name. If the name doesn't exist, and if the name provided is numerical, then it will look up a group id.

Regards,
Alister