Recursively chown all files that are owned by a specific user

Question

Is it possible to find and chown all files that a specific user owns? I did a bunch of things as the wrong user and need to give the correct user ownership of the files.

Is there a recursive and conditional way I can chown a bunch of files and directories?

Answer 1

You can use this portable find command with something like this.

find . -user old-user -exec chown new-user:new-group {} \;

You can expand this to find specific files with -iname options (non POSIX but available on OSX)

find . -iname '*.html' -user www-data -exec chown www-data:www-data {} \;

The . stands for the current folder and below, so you could use a specific path as a base.

find /var/www/ -iname '*.html' -user www-data -exec chown www-data:www-data {} \;

Answer 2

You can use

chown --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP -R new_owner:new_group  *

From the manual chown --help:

  --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP
                     change the owner and/or group of each file only if
                     its current owner and/or group match those specified
                     here.  Either may be omitted, in which case a match
                     is not required for the omitted attribute.

edit: This, of course, only works on linux and most UNIces. For OSX (which is based on BSD) see the solution of @StephenTrapped.

Answer 3

The -h option of chown changes the permission of the symbolic link files themselves and not just the target.

Which could be crucial when doing this on software binary folders, which use symoblic links to switch between versions.

find . -user old-user -exec chown -h new-user:new-group {} \;