Conditionally change group ID
 

I have a set of files that have a group ID number where no group exists in the system with that number.

I want to recursively read the group IDs of all (including hidden) files in the current and sub-dirs, test each file's group ID, and if it equals the search GID number, I want to execute a chgrp command on that file.

Anyone have an admin script already made for this task?

Thanks in advance!

'cd' to the directory that you want to start in.

Then try
where xxxx is the "bad" GID. This will show you all of the files with that GID.

If you're happy with the list
to change xxxx to yyyy.

Or, if you want to confirm each one
which could be tedious...

Thanks, Tommy! I'll give that a try and post back here.

When I've had the problem, I've just created a group with the "unassigned" number, and proceeded from there. But the find solution should suggested by johnE1 will also work.

SOLVED: Conditionally change group ID
 

Tommy, your examples were very helpful. Thank you!

Here's what I ended up using.

To verify find results:
find . group xxxx -print0 | xargs -0 ls -AL

To change group of each file (and sub-directory) found:
find . group xxxx -print0 | xargs -0 chgrp yyyy

NOTE: Those are zeroes (0's).

Cool. Your way is an excellent alternative, especially (I think) when there are a very large number of files to change.
As the Perl people say, "Tim Toady" - There's More Than One Way To Do It (TMTOWTDI).