When I installed a new copy of my distro on another partition, in order to preserve all the settings from my old my user account, I made a user account with the same name on the new installation, and then copied my old user account's files (in their entirety) to the new user account, overwriting it. I did the copying from the root account (where else? I assume the new user account can't overwrite itself while it's open), and root became the owner of everything I copied, making it impossible to open the new user account. So I then chowned the new user account's folder to myself.

I still can't get in, because apparently, chown only chowned the top folder, leaving all subdirectories owned by root. How do I make chown include all subdirectories? I scanned the man page, but didn't see a parameter. Don't tell me I have to chown every folder and file one by one.

Try When in doubt, check the man page:

That should get all files, folders, etc. Be careful with permissions, though, they don't mean the same thing on files and directories ('x' and 'r').

# chown -R <username>:<usergroup> /home/<username>

chown -R <username> directory