ownership in symlinks

cochoa · 11-23-2004, 10:20 AM

Hi, I am having a problem I hope you can help me to solve.

I have a shell script that is run by root, that moves some stuff to another location and leaves at the original place a symbolic link instead.

The problem is that the owner of the link is root, and I would like to have the original user as the owner of the link (so he can follow and access the original file)

Any ideas on how to do that? I looked at ln man pages, but found nothing about ownership

Thx

rjlee · 11-23-2004, 11:00 AM

You need to use chown with the -h option see

Code:

man chown

cochoa · 11-24-2004, 02:58 AM

The problem is that this script is run for files belonging to several users, so I have to figure out how can I get the owner.group attribute of such files in order to use chown

reddazz · 11-24-2004, 05:59 AM

why not create a group of users who can run the script, and the group permission to run the script?

cochoa · 11-24-2004, 08:17 AM

Mainly because this is a script intended to move stuff to a offline disk. The idea is that users leave in a particular file the path to the files they want to move offline, and then this script runs on a daily basis, and moves those files offline leaving a link to the new location of the file. But then I would need to identify the user.group of each file being moved in order to create the link with the same user.group, unfortunatedly I do not know how to do this from inside the script.

cochoa · 11-24-2004, 09:03 AM

Ok, I think that the script can get the owner.group info by issuing the following command:

ls -l filename | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 3,4

What do you think? I am not sure if this is totally ok, ls -l filename list the file, tr squeezes all extra spaces between fields, and cut get fields 3 (owner) and 4 (group)

JZL240I-U · 11-24-2004, 09:05 AM

Code:

ls -la

(That's LS-LA) should show owner and group. Pipe it over to any tool to manipulate output (forgot the comand, sorry) and load the value to $OWNER. Then do a chown...

<edit> Hehe this is simultaneity for you

Glad you knew the comand as well...