On Thu, Oct 11, 2007 at 01:16:27PM -0500, Jonathan Wilson wrote: > On Thursday 11 October 2007 13:04, Jonathan Wilson wrote: > > On Wednesday 10 October 2007 13:04, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > > > I seem to recall once I did a chown -R something and it followed the > > > /. and /.. links in the directory so that it started walking up the > > > directory tree. luckily I stopped it. Perhaps chmod -R is doing a > > > similar thing? > > > > > > A > > > > That does /not/ happen with any utility's -R. They don't walk up the tree > > with ../ , it would be way too dangerous to have any utility work that way. > > Think about it. Below are some exampoles using * and even .* to prove it > > (it's a little hard to read with line wrapping): > > Actually, I was wrong! (partially) and it's somewhat frightening. It does > indeed climb up one level - just one, I don't know why. > > (please note that in my examples I'm using a combination of ls -l and ls -ld ) > > Running chown -R .* does in fact, change the ownership of just one level up: >
... > > However, this would mean the OP had to do something like: > cd /dev > ch[mod] -R .* > > because chown -R * does not climb the tree like .* does. > maybe OP did cd / chown -R /dev/.* in an attempt to get any hidden files in /dev? or maybe the finger slipped. In any event, I *knew* I had encountered something like this with chown affecting *WAY* more than I thought it should. IIRC, it ran through my whole mail spool instead of just one user's stuff or somthing like that. A
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