> if you only wanted to change the local dot files... oh well... > we all learn and remember the hard way... :-) > shoulda been: chmod pattern ~/.*
NO. ~/.* includes .. ~/.. too, if expanded by the shell. In this case this would be /root/.. which is nothing els but / ... the same mess again :-) find -name ".*" -not -name ".." -not -name "." -maxdepth 1 is one way to get all dot-files and dot dirs in the same dir, this piped through a xargs chmod -R o-rwx will do what the "chmod -R o-rwx .*" was supposed to do in the original post... Martin
