How to Chown a directory recursively including hidden files or directories

Question

Seems like chown with the recursive flag will not work on hidden directories or files. Is there any simple workaround for that?

Answer 1

I'm pretty sure the -R flag does work - it always has for me anyway. What won't work, and what tripped me up early in my command line usage, is using * in a directory with hidden files/directories. So doing

$ chown -R /home/user/*

will not do the hidden files and directories. However if you follow it with

$ chown -R /home/user/.[^.]*

then you will do all the hidden files, (but not . or .. as /home/user/.* would do). Having said all that, I would expect

$ chown -R /home/user

to get all the hidden files and directories inside /home/user - though that will of course also change the permissions of the directory itself, which might not be what you intended.

Answer 2

i believe the following command should work for this

chown -hR userid:usergroup /nameofdirectory/nameofsubdir/

Answer 3

"chown -R" works, but an alternative would be using find.

 find /path/to/dir -exec chown USER {} \;

Answer 4

Also, if you're like me you'll probably be running chown mostly from the current directory. I was accustomed to running it like this: chown rails.rails -R * . Simply changing the asterisk to a dot (short for the current directory) like this: chown rails.rails -R . brings in all hidden directories.

Answer 5

You can change the dotglob attribute temporarily to expand . files and then revert it.

shopt -s dotglob; chown -R user:group FOLDER; shopt -u dotglob

More on dotglob can be found here

Answer 6

chown will work with hidden files and directories. In the following example, we will change user and group ownership for all files in ~/some/folder. All files includes all hidden files (e.g. .bashrc,.profile etc.) and folders at the ~/some/folder level and below. Note in particular that we do not wish to change ownership of ~/some, and so we will exclude the file ~/some/.. from the ownership changes.

$ cd ~/some/folder 
$ sudo chown -R usrname:grpname . 
$ 

Answer 7

Using for-loop with ls -A option, We can find all hidden files and directory exclude . and .. and then change the ownership for all hidden files and directory.

for i in `ls -A | grep "^\."`;do chown -R user:group $i;done

Use xargs option with ls -A

ls -A | grep "^\." | xargs chown user:group

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Answer 8

Thread ressurection !

find /path -type f -name ".*" -exec chown user:group {} \;

Answer 9

To chown ALL files in current directory and subdirectories for current user;

find . -exec chown $(whoami) {} \;

or if user can't chown some files due to restricted permissions;

sudo find . -exec chown $(logname) {} \;

Answer 10

You could do something like

for i in `ls -A`;do chown -R user:group $i;done

The -A (capital A) is important as it excludes '.' and '..'