Recusively change the owner of files (chown) on Mac OS X
I've just changed my OS X / Mac main user - I've created a new 'coder' user account that I want to use for development instead of my old 'lombard' account. I realized that a lot of my applications I've previously installed via Homebrew now had to be changed to be owned by the new coder user. First I ran 'brew doctor' find see what obvious issues I have:
Gerts-Mac-mini:src coder$ brew doctor Warning: /usr/local/etc isn't writable. This can happen if you "sudo make install" software that isn't managed by by Homebrew. If a brew tries to write a file to this directory, the install will fail during the link step.
You should probably `chown` /usr/local/etc xcode-select: note: no developer tools were found at '/Applications/Xcode.app', requesting install. Choose an option in the dialog to download the command line developer tools. xcode-select: note: no developer tools were found at '/Applications/Xcode.app', requesting install. Choose an option in the dialog to download the command line developer tools.
Warning: You have an outdated version of /usr/bin/install_name_tool installed. This will cause binary package installations to fail. This can happen if you install osx-gcc-installer or RailsInstaller. To restore it, you must reinstall OS X or restore the binary from the OS packages.
Warning: Git could not be found in your PATH. Homebrew uses Git for several internal functions, and some formulae use Git checkouts instead of stable tarballs. You may want to install Git: brew install git
Warning: No developer tools installed. Install the Command Line Tools: xcode-select --install xcode-select: note: no developer tools were found at '/Applications/Xcode.app', requesting install. Choose an option in the dialog to download the command line developer tools.
Indeed, several files/directories below '/usr/local' were created by Homebrew as user 'lombard':
Gerts-Mac-mini:src coder$ ls -l /usr/local total 80 -rw-r--r-- 1 lombard admin 3158 5 Jun 09:16 CODEOFCONDUCT.md -rw-r--r-- 1 lombard admin 687 5 Jun 09:16 CONTRIBUTING.md drwxr-xr-x 4 lombard admin 136 17 Jun 17:11 Cellar -rw-r--r-- 1 lombard admin 1253 5 Jun 09:16 LICENSE.txt drwxr-xr-x 9 lombard admin 306 17 Jun 17:11 Library -rw-r--r-- 1 lombard admin 1858 5 Jun 09:16 README.md -rw-r--r-- 1 lombard admin 23719 5 Jun 09:16 SUPPORTERS.md drwxrwxr-x 12 root admin 408 17 Jun 17:11 bin drwxr-xr-x 3 lombard admin 102 17 Jun 17:11 etc drwxrwxr-x 5 root admin 170 17 Jun 17:11 lib drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 17 Jun 17:11 libexec drwxrwxr-x 4 root admin 136 17 Jun 17:11 share
I can't just use 'chown -R' because I only want to change the owner of some specific files. To recursively fix/change the owner only of files specifically owned by another user, use the versatile 'find' command: