HOW TO : Search ownership of files in Linux

Say you have a directory with a bunch of sub directories and files and you want to see if all the files are owned by a particular user, you can use the following set of commands

[code]ls DIRECTORY_PATH -l -R | awk {‘print $3’} | grep -v USER_NAME[/code]

The set of commands do the following

• ls -l -R shows the list of files and directories
• awk prints the name of the owner of the file (it is the third column)
• grep shows only the lines where the owner name doesn’t match

And yeah.. this works in most variants of Linux :).