Hello,

Recently, I was a complete doofus and changed all the ownership and group of all files in the home directory to a particular user and group. Luckily however I have a backup, but it is slightly old so there probably is some changes. So what I would like to do is to be able to "sync" the ownership and groups. Does anyone know of the best way to do this?

My current thinking is:
1) Use find to get all files in backup
2) Find the user and group
3) Apply this to the actual file

Not sure on the implementation though.

Thanks

Dan

This is what I have so far:

This seems to work, but it doesn't with filenames that have spaces in it. I suppose the source of the problem is the find command.

I don't know of a tool which does this automatically, but given some time for the problem, here's how I would approach it.

1. Set sane defaults for permissions of the existing files. This probably means:
   
   Code:

   chown -R user:group /home/user
   find /home/user -type d -print0 |xargs -0 chmod 755
   find /home/user -type f -print0 |xargs -0 chmod 644
   chmod 755 /home/user/bin/*
   chmod 700 /home/user/private /home/user/.gnupg /home/user/.ssh

2. Extract the backup to a different location.
3. Write a little Perl program (or similar) to check each file and directory in /home/user (recursively), and if the file exists in the restored backup, set the permissions and ownership accordingly.

Fixed it.

Used
instead of