this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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find <directory> -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -P 4 -n 500 chownThat should find every file in your directory recursively, pass it to xargs, which will then spawn up to four processes which will each call chown on up to 500 files, and it'll make additional processes as they finish.
In general though, if you regularly need to chown that many files, it's better to find a way to make sure they have the right ownership from the start.
Thanks for adding that tidbit at the end. The reason that permissions get out alignment is due to different non-privledged accounts (for saftey) will write or copy files somewhat regularly from outside of the main system. I am the furthest thing from a linux expert so maybe you would have a recommendation or better insight after explaining that? This necessitates changing the owner and permissions regularly, especially when I need to interact with the files adhoc and have to wait for my script to run and complete.
If you have multiple users writing to a directory, you should be relying on groups, permissions, and sgid and not care who the owner is.
But what if user A in a new group creates dir "abc" - will dir "abc" automatically be set to the correct group? I would think the group permission would be just like the user permission, not set until manually set.
Yeah since I learned on Windows servers for 20 years, I'm struggling on permissions and groups in Linux in general.
In Windows it's as easy as enabling 'children inherit parent' and then the users can go and create whatever and if they can write, they'll write it with inherited from the parent permissions. If you change a folder deeper, you can unlink inheritance from the parent and then it could also optionally be the new parent for all children permissions.
I tried a couple of times to do this in Linux and I've always struggled due to my own lack of knowledge and understanding. I feel reading it I keep coming to the wrong conclusion too perhaps based on my experience and bias in reading it.
Anyway I know it's not helpful but I feel the struggle.
Thanks for chiming in, im glad its not just me. I feel like i have a much stronger understanding on things more complicated tham groups! That makes it feel worse
I don't really understand your use case.
It sounds like you have multiple users creating files in a directory, and some users are creating them with more-restrictive permissions than you want -- like, you want to force them to make their stuff accessible by everyone else -- and you're trying to avoid that by regularly modifying all the permissions?
If you set the sgid bit on the parent directory, then by default, things created in that directory will inherit the group of the parent directory.
But a user can still change permissions so that that isn't the case.
It's possible that you could use ACLs or something like that to address your problem, but I don't know what it is that you're trying to achieve.
What you proposed with sgid sounds like it might be what i need. All of the users are controlled my me, it's just when they connect to the smb share of the main system from other devices, i figured it was good security to use an account that is separate from my main account on the system, so they can't access the entire system or execute sudo commands
If this is specific to a Samba server, it looks like you can set it to use whatever uid/gid you want.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/530038/remap-uid-in-samba-share