'chown' and hidden directories

[Bill Davidson]

On 07:39 Wed 23 Feb     , Michael Hipp wrote:
> Even worse, I found out that chown does not behave as (I) expected:
> 
>   chown -R michael: *

In this example, the shell is expanding * to all files in the current
directory and passing that to chown. Bash hides dotfiles unless the dot is
stated explicitly or the dotglob shell option is set. 

I mentioned incorrectly in a previous post that you could use "set -o dotglob"
to change that behaviour. The correct invocation is "shopt -s dotglob" to
allow wildcards to implicitly expand to dotfiles. Use "shopt -u dotglob" to
unset the option.

I've tried this using "ls *" and it doesn't include "." or "..", which is what
you wanted. Although you might not want the extra steps of setting and
unsetting shell options.

> behaves differently than
> 
>   chown -R michael: /path/to/target

In this case, you're passing a directory to chown and chown is looking inside
that directory. It's not relying on bash to expand a wildcard for it.

> The latter processes dot-hidden directories, the first does not. Perhaps 
> this is intentional, but it looks like a bug to me.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Michael
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