chown -R guest.users .* If you don't see the mistake right of the bat, just remember .* also matches '..' I can't believe I did that! Argh! I was preparing a guest samba share and was trying to chown all the contents to the guest account. With the command 'chown -R guest.users *' hidden files are not chown'ed, hence the second (stupid) command I executed. Fortunately, I caught the mistake before my whole system was chown'ed. The directories affected were: /usr/bin/* /usr/lib/* I have a standard RH 7.2 distribution with everything installed. I don't have another system to compare the directories to. If anyone knows of an simple way to fix this, I'm all ears! Otherwise, if someone with a full RH 7.2. distribution would be so kind as to send me the information from their machine, I could write a script to chown those directories based on that. ls -laR /usr/bin | gzip -9c > usr-bin.gz ls -laR /usr/lib | gzip -9c > usr-lib.gz Then just send me the usr-bin.gz and usr-lib.gz. If you know of a better way to send the info, that is fine too. Thanks in advance!!! David