Is there a way to selectively chown the files/folders owned by a particular user, while leaving other files/folders untouched? I'm in the process of migrating to a fresh user account on my machine. I copied what I need from the old user's home directory and chowned it recursively, as described on an Apple support page. The support page makes no mention of chowning files/folders elsewhere on the machine, but I've found plenty of stuff in other locations that are owned by the old user:
- /Applications (lots of stuff)
- /Library (lots of stuff)
- /private/var/tmp (a small lot)
- /private/var/vm/app_profile/ (2 files)
- /usr/local/clamXav/ (1 easily replaceable file)
- /usr/local/lib/codec/ (4 files/folders)
I'm planning to delete the old user once I'm confident that everything is working, and I'm not sure what would happen if some critical files are owned by a deleted user. The old user was an admin account, if that matters. Oh, and I'm running OSX 10.4.11 on a PPC mac, if that matters.
Any help appreciated 🙂
Best Answer
You can check and re-assign ownership recursively over a directory tree with
find
,stat
andchown
.