Shell Programming and Scripting

I am working on a test machine.
I just discovered that I have misunderstood the way the following command is run.

Code:

chown -Rv some_user:users /some_folder/*

This command do exactly what I want. Change the owner of every things from the named folder and in all child folders.
But of course it leave untouched all hidden object like '.some_dir' and '.some_file'
So I run the following command ( and problem arise )

Code:

chown -Rv some_user:users /some_folder/.*

I can see on the screen that the command is climbing up one directory level doing something like

Code:

..........
..........
..........
chown /some_folder/../some_other_folder/.......
..........
..........
..........

What is the correct command to change every things without climbing up one level.

Do you have access rights to the hidden files that you are trying to change the owner of?

Often hidden files are configuration/shell/user files created by the system manager and the user cannot change them.

If you are the system manager then try using your root account to change the owner.

Code:

chown -Rv some_user:users /some_folder

should change the owner of the folder /some_folder and all its files and sub-directories.

If you don't want to change the ownership of /some_folder the following will work for all hidden files with the second character being lower-case letters:

Code:

chown -Rv some_user:users /some_folder/.[a-z]*

so it will pick up files such as .bashrc but not .SciTEUser.properties.

Obviously you can extend the pattern to allow upper-case and numerals if necessary.

Andrew

You could also set the dotglob control setting to have the shell include filenames starting with a . in the results of pathname expansion:

Code:

$ shopt -s dotglob
$ ls -d *
.bash_profile    .bashrc    .exrc    bin
$ shopt -u dotglob
$ ls -d *
bin

Attention: the SysV chown changes the target of symbolic links; normally you want to change the owner of the symbolic links so you need the -h option
(old Linux chown was different, like BSD chown).
In a shell glob the [!.] is any character but a dot. (A few shells have [^.] in addition, that is not portable).

Code:

chown -hRv some_user:users /some_folder/* /some_folder/.[!.]*

Perhaps you can include the parent directory? Then it becomes simple:

Code:

chown -hRv some_user:users /some_folder

chown does not ignore hidden files. Only ls does that, as a user convenience.

Those files must have been preserved for some other reason, probably different ownership than you expected, and that won't change until you fix that.

@Corona688.....Thanks for the concise explanation. I tried to say that in post#2 without success.