How do I change group ownership on folders created by a specific user?

Question

I have user who has created a folder and so the permissions are user:user. I have now added user to group so my question is how can I update all folders created by user, as if I'd done chown user:group, but not all folders, because some have different owners. In effect - refresh folders to update the new group rights? Filezilla lists them still with the old user:group permissions.

Solution

Use find to do this:

find -type d -user $USER -exec chown :groupname {} +

it will finds all directories which belongs to the user $USER and changes the group of them to groupname.

• Note: $USER is the current user you can change it with your desired one.

Comments

[Zanna]

chown :group folder1 folder2 folder3? What's wrong with that?

[Ukuser32]

Me being silly. I didn't know you could just use :group and didn't have to do user:group. I will leave this in case anyone else comes across it.

[Ziazis]

Why use chown for just changing the group if there is an explicit command for that called "chgrp"?

[muru]

And I'd use the test for group ownership instead of user ownership (for cases like user:group2) (Also, -exec ... {} +)

[Ravexina]

@muru I didn't get your point :/ (find updated)

[muru]

Right now files are owned by user:user, but some, according to OP, have different owners (say user2:user or user:group2). In that case, it'd make sense to only change :user to :group.

[Ravexina]

@muru got it ;)