----- Original Message ----- From: "Andrew Cutler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, December 20, 2002 2:22 PM Subject: chown broken??
> Hello > > > > I just hosed one of my boxes by recursively setting all my > file permissions incorrectly: > > $ su > $ cd /data > $ chown -R andrew:wheel * > $ chown -R andrew:wheel .* > > > For some reason the last command was interpreted as: > $ chown -R andrew:wheel /* Nope; the recursion includes ".." here: "/" in your case, as others already pointed out. I must say, though, that while I understand this behaviour, one can argue on what exactly "recursive" is to mean here. Intuitively, the definition of "the current sub-directory and all sub-directories below the current directory (and that for each subdirectory)" seems the correct one. Which would exclude "..", as this is not a sub-directory of the current directory, but the parent. But this behavior is not inconsistent; try "cp -R .*", and you will find it does the same. :) - Mark To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
