Comments on: Linux: Changing UIDs and GIDs for a user

By: Farid

Farid — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 14:26:43 +0000

I observed that the setuid, setgid and sticky bits are not retained after chown and chgrp commands are run. I had to track down the special files and reset these bits. My advice is to list them before making the above changes. Here's a command that I used to create my list:

find / \( \( -perm -4000 -o -perm -2000 -o -perm -1000 \) -a \( -group  -o -user  \) \) \
 -printf "\n%p|%m\n" -ls 2> /dev/null

By: rezwits

rezwits — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 22:24:53 +0000

Thanks, this helps greatly for me with a mixed environment of Macs and Linux installs. Where the UID and GID don’t match for the initial users in Fedora and Ubuntu and Mac OS, then after that I LDAP everything and change accordingly.

Laters…

By: Standardisation issues.

Standardisation issues. — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 11:33:17 +0000

[...] users on all machines. Changing the ownership of those files is done according to this web page: http://muffinresearch.co.uk/archives…gids-for-user/ Note that this is most easily done with a script which is set up once based on the UIDs and GIDs [...]

By: Stuart Colville

Stuart Colville — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 10:03:15 +0000

@Jared: Very good point well made. I’ve updated the post to reflect the need to use -h.

By: Jared

Jared — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 02:26:21 +0000

But, note that chown and chgrp follow symbolic links, altering the file pointed to rather than the link itself, unless you used the -h switch. If a user creates a link to a system file, they get ownership of it when you run your commands. You may not have known if this had happened unless you also used the -v switch to report all operations or ran find again after making the changes.