[[APi]TheMan]

I have a bunch of user home folders that I want to change owner/group to their owners and groups. I thought it would be as simple as making a simple script that took two command line arguments (user and group) and then ran chown and chmod using those variables ($1 and $2). Here's where I started:

Code:
chown -R $1:$2 /Homes/$1
chmod -R 755 /Homes/$1

Here I would run the script specifying the user and group (whose home folder has the same name as his shortname) such as this:

Code:
[aorth@csucub1: ~/testing]$ sudo ./fix_permissions someone somegroup 
chown: somegroup: Invalid argument

When I check out the someone directory, the permissions on that are 755 just like I told chmod to do in the script but chown keps erroring out. What gets me is, why doesn't chown behave like chmod with these stupid variables?

Now I've been attempting to fix this stupid script for an hour now and I probably could have done all 260 users by hand in this amount of time. It just pisses me off that the computer could have done in in three seconds. Do I have to put something in brackets? Squigly brackets? Escape something? The shell has always been weird for me to program in.

[Mithras]

Huh, something similar works fine for me

Code:
#!/bin/sh
chown -R $1:$2 /Users/Shared
chmod -R 755 /Users/Shared

You sure the group names that you're entering work fine? Have you tried entering the command by hand to confirm it works as expected on the command line?

e.g.
[user@host ~/testing] new_u = someuser
[user@host ~/testing] new_g = somegroup
[user@host ~/testing] chown -R $new_u:$new_g /Homes/$new_u

?

[[APi]TheMan]

Originally posted by Mithras:
Huh, something similar works fine for me

Code:
#!/bin/sh
chown -R $1:$2 /Users/Shared
chmod -R 755 /Users/Shared

You sure the group names that you're entering work fine? Have you tried entering the command by hand to confirm it works as expected on the command line?

e.g.
[user@host ~/testing] new_u = someuser
[user@host ~/testing] new_g = somegroup
[user@host ~/testing] chown -R $new_u:$new_g /Homes/$new_u

?

Were you using legit users and groups? I just figured it out I think. I was testing it with a fake user, for who I made a folder in /Homes/, but he did not have an account on the system.

Before I decided to write the script I tested on a legit user (with a legit group) by just issuing the chown and chmod commands manually. Then I wrote that script thinking that it should work fine. From your suggestion I tried the command by just using chown someuser:somegroup, and of course it failed. Then I tried for a legit user and group and it worked. Here's what happened...

The users for whose home folders I was trying to manipulate do not have local accounts, they are in a Mac OS X server directory. While I was playing with permissions in the Get Info window none of the pulldown menus listed any of these users or groups. This made sense to me as they are no local accounts so they should not be showing up. I thought Mac OS X Server was behaving as it should but I guess I was wrong, the OS knows about those users in the LDAP database too. So I assume that once I give it a try again everything will be ok.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction