Find, chown and exclude directories

Question

I would like to change the ownership of all files and directories but exclude some directories:

find -user test ! -path "./dir1/*" ! -path "./dir2/*" -exec chown -R root:root {} \;

The ownership of the excluded directories is still changed?

Regards

Solution 1

find . \( -path ./dir1 -o -path ./dir2 \) -prune -o -user test -exec chown root:root {} \;

Personally, for performance reasons, I prefer:

find . \( -path ./dir1 -o -path ./dir2 \) -prune -o -user test -print0 | xargs -0 chown root

Solution 2

Try this:

find . -user test | grep -v '^./dir1\|^./dir2' 

to check if the list is correct and

find . -user test | grep -v '^./dir1\|^./dir2' | xargs chown root:root

to do the rename.

Comments

[MadHatter]

You're missing an argument: the directory to start the find in. Since that defaults to ., if it happens to be owned by user test, it will match, and then you're recursively chowning everything under that anyway.

[FooBee]

You have this backward. This will work only on dir1 and dir2. The OP want to work on everything except those two.

[mlv]

No. Doing -prune means exclude dir1 and dir2. The or (-o) means if you didn't prune them like you did with dir1 and dir2, then do the chown.

[FooBee]

Yes, you are right. Anyway, this still includes the base dirs in the output and will chown them.

[mlv]

Yes, it includes . and other directories in . I thought that was asked.

[FooBee]

What I meant was that ./dir1 and ./dir2 will still be listed by this and such chowned. It's not recursive anymore, but still.

[mlv]

It has the added bonus (when you use -print0 and xargs -0) of handling files with spaces in it.

[mlv]

Did you try it? I did. It works fine. I did, in a directory, find . \( -path ./dir1 -o -path ./dir2 \) -prune -o -type d -print and all the directories where I was printed except dir1 and dir2.

[FooBee]

Yes, and here it prints the base names.

[mlv]

What's your OS? I just tried it on OSX and Ubuntu 13.10 and it works fine.