In article <2f86eabc-697f-4f57-3a0a-f2e5da13d9d7 at nist.gov>, Chris Schanzle via CentOS <centos at centos.org> wrote: > My guess is you used something like > >  find -uid=500 -exec chown 1000 {} \; > > This will start a chown process for each file, changing only one file at a time. That's a lot of work the system has > to do for each file! But you probably know chown (and similar utilities) can take multiple file arguments, and 'find' > can help you take advantage grouping many arguments with the '+' operator to -exec: > >  find -uid=500 -exec chown 1000 {} + Well I never knew that! Thanks. For many years I have been doing: find ... -print0 | xargs -0 ... Ah, I see the newer syntax was introduced in CentOS 5. :-) Cheers Tony -- Tony Mountifield Work: tony at softins.co.uk - http://www.softins.co.uk Play: tony at mountifield.org - http://tony.mountifield.org