CHMOD Big Oops!

[Matthew Walker]

On Fri, November 10, 2006 9:36 pm, Erin Sharmahd wrote:
>> Once (on a work machine) I had messed up the ownership of my home
>> directory, so I did
>> [ross at localhost ~]# chown ross.ross -R *
>> which successfully gave me back ownership of all files in my home
>> directory ... except for any dot-files. Oops! So I then did:
>>
>> [ross at localhost ~]# chown ross.ross -R .*
>>
>> Little did I realize that .* matches not only the normal dot-files, but
>> also "." and, more importantly, "..". Oops. Technically * matches ..
>> too,
>> but I believe the shell zaps .. on a normal *, but doesn't for a ".*".
>> Live and learn, I guess!
>>
>> 	~ Ross
>
> and that was with bash, i'm guessing.  supposedly zsh is much better
> behaved in this instance, but i haven't actually tested it...  at least
> it wasn't 'rm -rf .*'
>
> ~erin
>

Actually, this one confuses me, because I have on many occasions used .*,
and I use bash exclusively, and this has never been a problem for me.

Maybe this is from years ago, but in at least the last four or five years,
it hasn't behaved this way.

-- 
Matthew Walker
Kydance Hosting & Consulting
LAMP Specialist