Need a Quick Shell Script

In the above command, the shell expands the last argument (the one with the file path and wildcard) to a list of all the files in the specified path with the specified extension. Then, the chown command with the -R option takes each one and changes the ownership of that file and anything below it, if any of your *.ext files were actually directories.

What it sounds like you want to do would be accomplished by something of the form

chown user:group `findpath-to-tree -name '*.ext'`

Make sure to use backquotes (unshifted tilde) on the outside and single quotes (unshifed double quote) on the inside.

There is a more modern, politically correct, syntax instead of the backquotes, but I don't recall it at the moment.

What this does is run the find command to return the full paths to any file '*.ext' under the specified base path. The (standard) output of the find command becomes the argument list for the chown command.

If you want to get a bit fancier, you can use the xargs command, but I'm not familiar enough with it to give an example. This question has been asked and answered many times, and you can see the earlier answers by pointing a web browser at groups.google.com, selecting advanced search, entering *linux* for newsgroups, and entering some relevant search terms. I'd try a few combinations of xargs, recursive, chmod, chown, find.

Good luck.

Robert Riches (Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)