Unable to chown although user exists

Question

I am unable to "chown" to username from UID.

For example:

123456789 123456789 jdoe
--------------------------------------

chown jdoe:jdoe jdoe

I get:

chown:invalid jdoe 'jdoe:jdoe'

but 'jdoe' exists.

i am trying to chown a home dir from UID to username. It's currently 123456789:123456789 and tyring to chown to jdoe:jdoe. — Mervyn Clarke, Jul 05 '17 at 12:51
jww is correct; however, reading `man chown` could save you the trouble of asking again. `chown` has two arguments: the directory, and the user/group. — jpaugh, Jul 05 '17 at 21:40

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 05 '17 at 12:53

0

this gonna change owner of UID directory to jdoe

cd ~
cd ..
sudo chown -R jdoe:jdoe UID/

answered Jul 05 '17 at 12:53

Ebrahim Poursadeqi

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I tried that. Output was: chown: invalid user: 'jdoe:jdoe' but jdoe does exist. – Mervyn Clarke Jul 05 '17 at 12:57
can you give me output of `id -u jdoe` ? – Ebrahim Poursadeqi Jul 05 '17 at 12:58
output: 123456789 – Mervyn Clarke Jul 05 '17 at 13:01
give output of getent passwd | grep jdoe – Ebrahim Poursadeqi Jul 05 '17 at 13:12
your user have some problem,you can backup jdoe home folder and recreate it again – Ebrahim Poursadeqi Jul 05 '17 at 13:38

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 09 '22 at 22:17

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I had this exact problem moving users from one system to another with different UID and GID. Linux used to allow users to have ids above 499. Now 999. Sigh

Anyway if you use numeric form in chmod you won't get the absurd error message.

cd /home
chmod -R 1003.1003 joe

This verified on Ubuntu 20

edited Oct 09 '22 at 22:17

Obsidian

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answered Oct 03 '22 at 21:55

Howard Moscovitz

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That cd line didn't format like I typed it. cd /home and chmod are on different lines, of course – Howard Moscovitz Oct 03 '22 at 21:57

Unable to chown although user exists

2 Answers2