How can I recursively change the owner of a directory to the user nobody in linux

I would like to change the owner of a directory and all files and directories below it to the user nobody.

I have a /parent_dir with owner root. I want to change the owner to nobody (system user) recursively.

6 Answers

Like this:

sudo chown -R nobody /parent_dir

You may change the owner of the directory recursively using the following command. -R stands for recursive.

chown -R ownername foldername

You can also change the owner and group of the directory recursively using the following command.

chown -R ownername:groupname foldername

For more details refer this.

You can do this by chown with -R option. -R is for recursive.

If Demo is the folder name and apache is the user and group, then run,

sudo chown -R apache:apache Demo

This will change the owner and group of every folder and files to apache.

By using the -R command line parameter of chown.

chown -R nobody /parent_dir

Just as an alternative to the other answers:

sudo find /parent_dir -exec chown nobody {} \;

if you only want to change files you could use -type f or -type d for directories. comes in handy, when you want to chmod stuff.

you need to make this parameter no_root_squash on /etc/exports

Good luck.