Finding files by their owner and file permissions

Question

I'm trying to find files which are owned and have the primary group of root. Is there a parameter available to search for files like this? It's critical that all files in a certain directory not be owned by root, so I'd like to check periodically to make sure that someone on the server isn't accidentally creating files owned by root (namely me). Sure, chown -R user:user /path works, but I'd like to be able to check.

score 83 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 17 '11 at 03:50

83

man find:

  -group gname
         File belongs to group gname (numeric group ID allowed).
  -user uname
         File is owned by user uname (numeric user ID allowed).

answered Oct 17 '11 at 03:50

Rainer Bendig

4,166

11

So obvious... Anyone else looked into the man page and searched for '-owner' instead of '-user'? – robsch Oct 16 '20 at 06:38
It's not obvious that the word is user for sure. Somehow I was imagining an option like find -chmod – Sridhar Sarnobat Apr 08 '22 at 16:37

Finding files by their owner and file permissions

1 Answers1