Linux – change the ownership of all the files of a specific user

Use the 'find' command if you have findutils version 4.3.0 or greater installed:

For all files under the current directory that are writable by the current user:

find . -writable

For all files under the current directory that are not writable by the current user:

find . ! -writable

According to the man page:

This test makes use of the access(2) system call, and so can be fooled by NFS servers which do UID mapping (or root-squashing), since many systems implement access(2) in the client’s kernel and so cannot make use of the UID mapping information held on the server.

This might sound like a silly idea, but if the users aren't actually doing anything, you could do:

cat /etc/passwd | cut -f 1 -d : >/tmp/users.list

Then edit /tmp/users.list to only contain the users you want. Then do:

for i in `cat /tmp/users.list`
do
    userdel $i
    useradd -m $i
done

However, many Redhat based distributions will create you a new home directory when you first login, providing it is specified in /etc/passwd where the directory should be.

To test that, do an "su - " and see if it does "the right thing". If it doesn't, the above script will work quite nicely, I think.