Folder Permissions

So i have a roughly 50GB folder of data that I recently transferred between Ubuntu machines (both running 11.04).

However, the machine to which I transferred the data, the folder says there are NO owners, thus, no permissions can be set. I basically only have read access. I can't cut files or folders out of the root folder.

So my question is, can I use chown to re-add permissions/an owner to the folder and it's sub-files and folders?

If so, how? I have the folder on the desktop.

 

open a terminal and type the following

chown username /path/to/directory

Try that and and see if it changes things. Probably need to do a chmod too.

 

wouldnt you need the -R so that it affects all files and folders under the directory? at lest thats what i do when i chmod and chown and its worked so far.

 

Yes -R flag is required and the groupname is also good to add.

Code:

chown username:groupname -R /path/to/directory

chmod wont be required assuming the rwx permissions of the earlier place would still be retained. Normally what I would do for copying a large amount of files between machines is - tar them at the source, and untar at the destination - untar automatically creates the files giving permissions to the user who is untarring.

 

I'll be tackling this in about and an hour and a half or so.

Thanks for the advice!

 

Sorry for the late update.

I had to chmod, then chown. I got it all worked out though!

All 50 GB has been assigned the correct owner. Thanks for the help!