[SOLVED] chown -R

brownie_cookie · 05-11-2011, 01:31 AM

Hi all

As you see in the thread title, this question is about the argument -R
In the man pages i found this:

Code:

-R, --recursive
              operate on files and directories recursively

but, my english isn't so good, so what do they mean with

Quote:

operate on files and directories recursively

??

because i do these commands

Code:

# chown nagios.nagios /usr/local/nagios
# chown –R nagios.nagios /usr/local/nagios/libexec

and i don't really understand what the difference is between the two, who does he use the argument -R in the second one and not in the first one??

thanks in advance

Kind regards

Brownie

neonsignal · 05-11-2011, 01:50 AM

Recursion is a repetition of a function in a similar way; often it refers to nested repetition. In a file system context, it refers to applying the same function on a file/directory, and repeating this on the subdirectories, and so on down to the bottom of the directory tree.

So the '-R' flag on chown means to change ownership not just of the parameter file/directory, but of any files or directories within that directory.

brownie_cookie · 05-11-2011, 02:13 AM

thanks

now it makes sense to me !!!

Kind regards

Brownie

MTK358 · 05-11-2011, 08:30 AM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion