James B. Byrne wrote:

I want a script to determine the owner of a particular file and then "sudo -u <thatuserid> <somecomand>". I ran across the --author option of ls but that does not seem to give me anything useful. It prints a short form of the filename without any other information at all. In fact, the output of ls --author is indistinguishable from that of ls by itself:

...

# ls --author htdocs/* htdocs/hlllogo.png # ls htdocs/* htdocs/hlllogo.png #

Is there a linux command that will return just the userid in a form that can be passed to sudo or do I have to parse ls -l <filename>?

I am digest subscriber so, if you could provide one, the favour of a direct copy of your reply is requested.

Regards, Jim

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ls -l <filename> | awk '{print $3}' will give you the owner of the file.

On 3/20/06, James B. Byrne ByrneJB@harte-lyne.ca wrote:

I ran across the --author option of ls but that does not seem to give me anything useful. [...] In fact, the output of ls --author is indistinguishable from that of ls by itself:

The linux manual pages for "ls" and other GNU coreutils are sometimes deficient. If I were the paranoid type, I'd say it was retaliation for not always calling it "GNU/Linux".

--author List each file's author when producing long format directory listings. In GNU/Hurd, file authors can differ from their owners, but in other operating systems the two are the same.

The centos4 manual page for "ls" neither explains what the "author" is nor mentions that the option only applies to "long format".