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If the uid or gid of a file is 4294967295, I need to modify its permissions with chown. This will be a bandaid solution for an rsync issue in cygwin (Details here).

How can this be implemented?

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KiloOne
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  • BTW, next time you're tempted to use `ls -R` in a situation like this, read through http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs. – Charles Duffy Dec 08 '15 at 23:12
  • WOW-WOW thanks, I will try the find that 'that other guy' suggests – KiloOne Dec 08 '15 at 23:15
  • Great edit, thanks Charles, I am learning :) – KiloOne Dec 08 '15 at 23:17
  • It's a tricky balance -- trimming down this far risks folks being unhappy that you didn't show that you at least tried something yourself. On the other hand, hiding the details of what you're actually trying to accomplish in the weeds of an attempted implementation isn't helpful either. If I were doing this again, I might make the second paragraph more like: "My most recent attempt is filtering `ls -R` output through `awk`, but this approach is being difficult; is there a better approach?" -- which shows that you've actually put in some effort yourself. – Charles Duffy Dec 08 '15 at 23:21
  • Agreed, will do better! – KiloOne Dec 08 '15 at 23:24

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XY indeed. Just use find:

find yourdir \( -uid 4294967295 -o -gid 4294967295 \)  \
    -exec chown youruser:yourgroup {} +
that other guy
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  • Wow, I've dabbled in too many languages and I am master of none :) Looks good I will give it a try :) shame shame on me! – KiloOne Dec 08 '15 at 23:11
  • I am a little concerned about the -o which means 'expr1 -o expr2 Or; expr2 is not evaluated if expr1 is true' and the fact that whenever there is a bad value of either u or g, the chown changes both u and g. I believe that there are situations that g is bad but u is good and your code would seem to change the good u to youruser anyway. – KiloOne Dec 08 '15 at 23:35
  • You can just as easily do `find yourdir -uid 4294967295 -exec chown youruser: {} + -o -gid 4294967295 -exec chown :yourgroup {} +`. I didn't study your rsync issue and the question didn't clarify. – that other guy Dec 09 '15 at 00:35
  • I have been trying that to see how much slower it is. In any case this appears to be the answer, thanks. – KiloOne Dec 09 '15 at 01:01
  • It may not have been XY if what I should have asked is this [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34205248/better-way-of-chowning-unknown-uid-gid-of-files-rsync-including-an-exclud] – KiloOne Dec 11 '15 at 14:45