Permission issues with files from WIN to LIN

FatRakoon · 21 Nov 2011 at 06:08

I have copied a load of files over from a Windows PC ( Win7/64 ) to my laptop ( Mint 11/64 ) into /home/damion/WIN. My username is damion ( Boringly, thats my name )

The files I have coped are a mixture of pics, music etc, I have dumped them into a shared folder and I wanted to move them, once they had all copied over, into their individual folders, Pictures, Music and so on, but they wont go.

On checking the owner, its nobody, the group is nogroup.

Its been a while, but chown and chgrp are a couple of commands that I tried to fall back on but they are simply doing NOTHING.

I have tried

chown damion /home/damion/WIN

also

sudo chown damion /home/damion/WIN

And of course chgrp instead of chown but as I said... Nothing comes of it.

Can any of you experts out there tell me WTF can be done?

I can for what its worth, read the files just fine... I cannot however do anythign else. I am not the owner and so I cannot change the permissions, nor can I move or delete them.

Thanks in advance

tntcoder · 21 Nov 2011 at 07:54

As root or sudo run: chown -R damion. /home/damion/WIN

-R for recursive, do the same for the group

If that doesnt work post the command output.

FatRakoon · 22 Nov 2011 at 03:08

Of course I forgot the recursive switch.

However, I see that you have added the . at the end of the user name? - as in "damion."

I never added that? I am sure that when I last used chown, I never used it back then either? What is the relevance of it, or would it have done it without just the same?

tntcoder · 22 Nov 2011 at 07:21

Ah sorry, that was my mistake, you can use the . to specify username.group with chown, saving the need for a separate chgrp.

chown -R damion /home/damion/WIN is correct, as is: chown -R damion.groupname /home/damion/WIN

FatRakoon · 22 Nov 2011 at 11:28

Ah, cool... I never knew that!
I have not needed to know it for many years mind you, but its good to know.

Many thanks mate... Much appreciated.

memyselfandi · 22 Nov 2011 at 12:49

A "." ? ... the man pages on the boxes I have access to, and when I've had to do it in the past, indicate that a colon ":" is used ... i.e.

Code:

chown -R fred:users myfile.txt

from the CentOS 5 chown man page:

Code:

...
EXAMPLES
           chown root /u
                  Change the owner of /u to "root".

           chown root:staff /u
                  Likewise, but also change its group to "staff".
...

tntcoder · 22 Nov 2011 at 16:27

memyselfandi said:
A "." ? ... the man pages on the boxes I have access to, and when I've had to do it in the past, indicate that a colon ":" is used ... i.e.

Code:

chown -R fred:users myfile.txt

from the CentOS 5 chown man page:

I believe . and : are generally interchangeable for chown. The . is from a very old POSIX standard I think, so you are correct, : is the better char to use but both should work