Can you recursively chown all files in the folder linked by a symbolic link?
Solution
As mentioned by @deong, the solution was to add the flag -H to the chown command. For example, to change the ownership recursively down the file linked by a symbolic link, you would do somehting like
<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">$ chown -HR <symbolic-link>
</span>
For reference, see the section on -H:
-H if a command line argument is a symbolic link to a directory, traverse it
Edit 1:
Another useful flag is -L:
-L traverse every symbolic link to a directory encountered
Original Post
On a server I have some folder, x, that contains many files. x has a symbolic link y. y is shared over the network via Samba. Some client creates some files with within the shared y folder (the files are then owned as client:client since I don’t have a forced user configured in samba). I tried to change the ownership of all of those files on the server by doing # chown -R new_user:new_group y, however the ownership of all the files within x stayed the same. I could only change their ownership if I did not chown across the symbolic link.
I thought chown could follow symbolic links?