Change user and group of all files in a folder?

[mazert]

Hi, I'm a newbie with servers and I wondered if you could change the user and group of all files in a folder because at the minute half of them are owned by ftp user and half by apache.

I've resized 300 image files and need to copy them back over.

I suppose I could delete them all in plesk file manager then re-upload them all, nothing could go wrong doing it that way could it?

[hunter_thom]

chown -R user:group /path/

will recursively change ownership.

chown user:group /path/*

will not recursively change ownership but will change ownership by directory.

You could also do something like this, perhaps all .conf or all .html or all .zip etc:

chown user:group /path/*.conf

[Jonathan183]

man chown and pick the options you want, you need root rights so either su to root or sudo chown user_who_should_own_files:group_owner_of_files
you may also want to check chmod as depending on who created the files you may want to change access rights for owner/group/other

[mazert]

Thanks for the quick reply.

My next newbie question is how do i access the command line?
Do i need to install something on the server?
Do i need to install OpenSSH on my windows comp?

At the minute i can only access the server [Linux 2.6.18] through Plesk 9 and FTP.

[linuxwin2]

Have you a ssh access to your server?

[mazert]

Yes i think the server can be accessed through ssh but i'm not 100% sure, i've downloaded Putty but havn't set it up yet, still reading the instructions on how to use it.