Change Folder & File Permissions for all Subdirectories

I created some files as root that I would now like to be changed to a specific user. How would I do this? I cannot go trough the files one by one as that'd just take way too much time. I would like to do this preferably trough Nautilus. If there is an easier way to do it trough console though, I'm all in.

Solution 1:

I'm not aware of any way you can do this in nautilus but you can do it from a command line

For example I have the following files in a directory

$ ls -la
total 400
drwxrwxr-x  2 warren warren   4096 Jun 22 17:49 .
drwxr-xr-x 74 warren warren  20480 Sep 21 13:05 ..
-rwxrwxr-x  1 root   root      199 Jun 22 18:02 ex1.py
-rwxrwxr-x  1 root   root       43 Jun 22 17:45 hello.py
-rw-rw-r--  1 root   root    27792 May 27 15:18 img.txt
-rw-rw-r--  1 root   root   323944 May 27 15:16 img.xcf
-rwxrwxr-x  1 root   root     3178 Jun  7 22:11 snake.py
-rw-rw-r--  1 root   root     3182 Jun  4 20:20 snake.py~
-rwxrwxr-x  1 root   root     7242 May 27 09:26 test
-rw-rw-r--  1 root   root      821 May 27 09:25 test.c

You can change all these to be owned by the user warren with:

sudo chown -R warren:warren *

As shown

warren@dell:~/test$ sudo chown warren:warren *
warren@dell:~/test$ ls -la
total 400
drwxrwxr-x  2 warren warren   4096 Jun 22 17:49 .
drwxr-xr-x 74 warren warren  20480 Sep 21 13:05 ..
-rwxrwxr-x  1 warren warren    199 Jun 22 18:02 ex1.py
-rwxrwxr-x  1 warren warren     43 Jun 22 17:45 hello.py
-rw-rw-r--  1 warren warren  27792 May 27 15:18 img.txt
-rw-rw-r--  1 warren warren 323944 May 27 15:16 img.xcf
-rwxrwxr-x  1 warren warren   3178 Jun  7 22:11 snake.py
-rw-rw-r--  1 warren warren   3182 Jun  4 20:20 snake.py~
-rwxrwxr-x  1 warren warren   7242 May 27 09:26 test
-rw-rw-r--  1 warren warren    821 May 27 09:25 test.c

the -R option means recursive; i.e. including sub-directories for more information enter man chown in a terminal.