How to Chown a directory recursively including hidden files or directories

Seems like chown with the recursive flag will not work on hidden directories or files. Is there any simple workaround for that?

Solution 1:

I'm pretty sure the -R flag does work - it always has for me anyway. What won't work, and what tripped me up early in my command line usage, is using * in a directory with hidden files/directories. So doing

$ chown -R /home/user/*

will not do the hidden files and directories. However if you follow it with

$ chown -R /home/user/.[^.]*

then you will do all the hidden files, (but not . or .. as /home/user/.* would do). Having said all that, I would expect

$ chown -R /home/user

to get all the hidden files and directories inside /home/user - though that will of course also change the permissions of the directory itself, which might not be what you intended.

Solution 2:

i believe the following command should work for this

chown -hR userid:usergroup /nameofdirectory/nameofsubdir/

Solution 3:

"chown -R" works, but an alternative would be using find.

 find /path/to/dir -exec chown USER {} \;

Solution 4:

Also, if you're like me you'll probably be running chown mostly from the current directory. I was accustomed to running it like this: chown rails.rails -R * . Simply changing the asterisk to a dot (short for the current directory) like this: chown rails.rails -R . brings in all hidden directories.