three points
i have found that "walking the tree" on netapps to be slow. parallel recursive chown's will increase speed by an order of magnitude. something like: for i in * .??* ; do chown -R $i & ; done
be careful not to walk the .snapshot tree. it's a waste of time and annoys the filer [+]
when using the -R option in chown, read up to see how symbolic links are handled. depending on your OS, you might or might not need a "-h" in there. we've been bit by people doing "chown -R" and changing files that they did not realize due to symlinks. usually shows up in the weirdest ways - like a selection of users *almost* logging correctly, while other users having no problems at all.
[+] apologizes to Samuel Clemens.
-- email: lance_bailey@pmc-sierra.com box: Lance R. Bailey, unix Administrator vox: +1 604 415 6646 PMC-Sierra, Inc fax: +1 604 415 6151 105-8555 Baxter Place http://www.lydia.org/~zaphod Burnaby BC, V5A 4V7 Disk is cheap. Deleting files is cheaper.
Steve Losen wrote:
If you run a separate chown process for each file, yes, that will be very slow. However, if these files are all in a small number of directory trees, then just use the recursive option of chown.
chown -R newuser:newgrp dir