Help avoiding .* problems

[Tom Condon]

Yup.  Shot myself in the foot again.

Some versions of *nix *do* and some versions *don't* allow 
access to '..' when you specify '.*' in a regular expression 
(say, chown).

I'm running RedHat on a laptop (and may need to re-install 
now), but I'd like to avoid this in the future.

Is there a way to set something so this *won't* happen?  If I 
want to change ownership of all of a user's files (because I 
copied one user to another) but don't want it going ../../.. 
on me (and thereby changing the entire filesystem).  Is there 
a way to do that?  Probably in root's setup files?

First clue: chown takes a while
Second clue: error message:
	chown: changing ownership of '../proc/526' : Operation not 
permitted

Thanks for any suggestions you can give me (besides never log 
on as root).


In Harmony's Way and In A Chord,

Tom  ;-})

Tom. Condon
Barbershop Bass Singer
Registered Linux User #154358
A Jester Unemployed