Edenyard wrote:

Dear All,

I'd be grateful for some guidance on this. As a Linux novice, I set up my system and used it with gay abandon as root (I know, I know...), gathering all sorts of useful data on the disk.

Now I know better (!), I have different user accounts, but the problem is that I have entire directories with subdirectories under them and files in all those, all of which belong to root/root. WHen I want to move them as an ordinary user, of course I'm denied access.

My question is: is there a command that I can issue (as root, presumably) that will go through an entire directory (including all the subs and files in each), changing the ownership of everything to what I specify (e.g., root/users or gerald/users, perhaps)?

Any clues most welcome!

chown -R user:group /<directory>

so:

chown -R gerald:users /home/mystuff