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On Thu, 18 May, 2006 at 10:57:48 -0500, Dennis J. Tuchler wrote:
I have some files on an external flash drive mounted at /media/usbdisk. All the files are owned by the root. I logged onto /media/usbdisk did "su" and then chown [user] *, only to get a notice for each file that the change of ownership is not allowed.
Sounds like an msdos filesystem on the disk, in which case; whoever mounts the disk 'owns' the files on it.
How do I change ownership of the files on that external drive?
You don't. What you *can* do is set things up so your user-account is allowed to mount the disk. After that "all your files are belong to you". The slightly longer explanation is that there are no such things as file-ownership, read/write/execute -rights in a FAT filesystem, so instead what's shown reflects who mounted the filesystem. HTH /Jon -- YMMV