[ubuntu-uk] rsync chgrp problem - advice, please?

[luxxius]

Matthew Macdonald-Wallace wrote:
<snip>
> Is there a reason why the group needs to be root?
> if you change the group to "diana" or "users", does that make a difference (it think it might...)

Nearly all the files in the music library had 'diana' as owner and 
'root' as group.  It was the half-dozen or so that had 'diana' as owner 
that were causing rsync to generate an error when it tried to chgrp 
these on the usb drive (which it couldn't do, as the drive is formatted 
FAT32).  (I don't actually know why rsync does this;  and Alan seems to 
get by with just ignoring it!)

Anyway, will I be ok doing the following?

sudo su
cd /home/diana/music
chmod -Rv 644
chown -Rv diana:root

(According to O'Reilly, chmod and chown don't have a Force option;
rather it gives this:
-f, --silent, --quiet	
Do not notify user of files that chmod/chown cannot change)

I'm now at the point where rsyncing the whole lot again is the least of 
my worries.

Forgive my anxieties about tinkering any further without some 
reassurance, but I am fairly new to this, and the music library 
represents days and days of work ripping CDs to flac!  Having it all but 
inaccessible now is making me very nervous!

--
Diana