sudo chown -R doesn't work. I'm going slightly mad...

[ml9104]

New Lubuntu install on a machine. New sudo/admin user works perfectly.
Adding two new users also work as they should.

Decided to clone my sudo admin user to one of the new users by copying /home/"sudousername" (including hidden files/dirs) to that user's /home directory.
Also no problem.
But changing the ownership of the new /home/... files/dirs is not possible. "chown" simply doesn't work,

sudo chown -R newuser:newuser /home/newuser/*

I'm tearing my hairs out here. I can manually change every file's ownership in PCManFM-Qt, but that's no end tedious.
Any ideas?

Thanks.

[ajgreeny]

I am not quite following what you're doing nor why but what is the final /* in your command; it is not needed às far as I can see?

Using the -R option makes the command recursive and if there is a space between the /home/newuser and the following /*, which there appears to be, you are pointing at the root folder as well as that home folder, a very dangerous thing to do.

[ml9104]

There's no space. Apparently [CODE] makes it look that way.

[ajgreeny]

OK, but I still don't think it's needed as the -R option means everything in /home/newuser will change, or should change ownership without that final /*.

Perhaps that is what is stopping the change from happening.

[HermanAB]

This should work:
$ sudo chown -R newuser: /home/newuser

unless you have AppArmor enabled.

(If you are wondering about the syntax, the : implies the same user and group)

[ml9104]

Interesting.
I'll try with

sudo chown -R /home/newuser

[ajgreeny]

That won't work; you must have the newuser: for the command to know who the user is to be changed to.
Without that information nothing will change.

[The Cog]

To be specific - like this:

sudo chown -R newuser:newuser /home/newuser

An extra gotcha using /home/newuser/* is that the * only expands to be all visible files, and would not include hidden items like .config or .bashrc.

[ActionParsnip]

Why is this being ran at all? Seems weird............

[ajgreeny]

Why is this being ran at all? Seems weird............

Agreed; hence my post #2 asking what it was all for.