The documentation for the "-H" flag to chown says,
The following options modify how a hierarchy is traversed when the
-R option is also specified. If more than one is specified, only
the final one takes effect.
-H if a command line argument is a symbolic link to a directory,
traverse it
This is not doing what I think it should do. In a terminal, as my "mjo"
system user, I can run,
$ mkdir foo
$ mkdir bar
$ ln -s ../bar foo/baz
$ sudo chown --verbose --recursive -H root foo
which outputs...
changed ownership of 'foo/baz' from mjo to root
changed ownership of 'foo' from mjo to root
However, the path "foo/baz" was not passed on the command-line, and
chown did in fact follow the symlink,
$ ls -l | grep bar
drwxr-xr-x 2 root mjo 4.0K 2017-12-20 13:19 bar
as evidenced by the fact that "bar" was created as mjo:mjo.
