how to copy files that belong only to a specific user
 

Hi,

In a directory, I have thousands of files owned by different users. How to specifically copy all the files that belong to one specific user in this directory to another directory without changing the ownership of the newly copied files? Thanks in advance.

Take a look at the "find" command (man find). There are options for just about everything.

The "exec" feature is useful for whatever action is to be taken on what is found.

Use the find command to locate these files. The -user option can filter the files to those owned by the user. The -exec option can be used to copy the files.

example
find sourcedir/ -type f -user <username> -exec cp '{}' destdir/ \;

Yes thanks. Thanks for the command.

But I have to run it twice. First on cp, then on chown.
Anyway, what is the {} symbols for? Is it the array of items found after the executing the find command?

So... there may be an easier way for this - but it's what I came up with...

We start with:
Which will return a listing of all files in the directory from the specified user. Now we have to hack off that extraneous stuff so that we have just a file name.
Lets turn this command into a variable that we can easily call:
Then it's a simple:

Try it out first obviously... but it should do the trick.

No, find works one file at a time. {} is the placeholder for the file that it has found on each step.

The second solution with the awk '{print $9}' works perfectly too. But both method I have to chown it manually.

Thanks to all gurus.

If the destination files are in one place, you can chmod them en-mass. Or a second find command with the -perm option could locate just files with incorrect permissions.

You could also use the find command to supply the names of file to a for loop. Inside the loop you could perform your cp & chmod operations in two separate lines.

… or, you could preserve ownership within cp if your implementation supports it:
Or, you could use find to do both separately:

find ./ -user username -exec chown whatever {} \; -exec cp -p {} /destination \;

Edit - way too slow.

Thanks billymayday. I had misread your post at first and rediscovered the same thing myself!

cp -a is the same as -dpR; which is to say... -d=same as --no-dereference --preserve=links, -p=same as --preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps, and -R=recursive. The -p or --preserve should maintain consistent attributes after a copy, at least it's always worked for me...