chown doesn't change ownership

[Nai Nehctik]

i have recently installed firefox 2 by using tar -xzvf while in root.
I want to make the program use the icon but all the files installed are owned by root. So in terminal I switch to root using su. then use the command

chown -R user. /home/user/Documents/Firefox/firefox/

After running the command i check the ownership and it is still owned by root. I have tried the option -c and it returns nothing. I know this is a weird directory to install to but chown should still work. Anyone know why I can change ownership?

[Dapper Dan]

I've never done it the way you have so maybe if I show you how I usually do it, it may shed some light. If I wanted to change ownership of a file from root to my regular user (Dapper) and to the group "users", I'd go as su:

chown -R Dapper:users /home/user/Documents/Firefox/firefox/

Hope that helps some.

[Nai Nehctik]

I rebooted at it showed them as non-root. I don't why exactly that would happen, but it fixed it. I had tried the way you described with nai (my username) like "nai:users" earlier, but that didn't work. I saw the nai. method I showed above at some site and thought it might do something different, but I think its just a different syntax for the same thing.
Thanks for the help though I'm still not through my first year running linux, so I'm figuring out my way around it.

[Dapper Dan]

Thanks for the help though I'm still not through my first year running linux, so I'm figuring out my way around it.

Stick with it, you'll get the hang of it!