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I have a strange issue with the following command:
# chown -R myuser:mygroup *
chown: invalid option -- 'i'
Try 'chown --help' for more information.
the command is not aliases
# type chown
chown is hashed (/bin/chown)
Where I can look further?
As the glob (pathname) expansion is done first by the shell before the chown runs, the glob pattern * is expanded to all files in the current directory first and chown is getting those as its options and arguments. You have a file in the current directory that starts with -i, hence chown is considering it as an option, not as an argument (filename).
You need to use -- to indicate the end of options for chown:
chown -R myuser:mygroup -- *
Or precede the glob pattern (*) with ./ to explicitly indicate it as argument:
chown -R myuser:mygroup ./*
chown -R myuser:mygroup ./*, it splits it into chown, -R, myuser:mygroup, ./* and then replaces glob patterns with the corresponding filesystem paths, eg. chown, -R, myuser:mygroup, ./-index.html, ./favicon.ico, ./My -ve Numbers. Since chown only looks for the first character being a dash when looking for option args, it will presume that those are positional args.
Sep 21, 2016 at 0:07
The issue was a file named -index.php in the folder, so chown interpreted it as a command line option.
The solution was using the double-hyphens chown -R myuser:mygroup -- *
chown -R myuser:mygroup ./*