On 29 May 2018 at 06:23, Giampaolo Rodola' <g.rodola@gmail.com> wrote:

...as in (not tested):

    def _rchown(dir, user, group):

        for root, dirs, files in os.walk(dir, topdown=False):

            for name in files:

                chown(os.path.join(root, name), user, group)

    def chown(path, user=None, group=None, recursive=False):

        if recursive and os.path.isdir(path):

            _rchown(dir, user, group)

        ...

It appears like a common enough use case to me ("chown -R path"). 

Thoughts?

https://bugs.python.org/issue13033 is a long-open RFE for this, proposing to add it as "shutil.chowntree" (naming inspired by "shutil.rmtree" and "shutil.copytree").

The "walkdir" project I mention on that PR has been on hiatus for a few years now (aside from a bit of activity to get a new release out in 2016 with several contributed fixes), but the main point of the comment where I mentioned it still stands: the hard part of designing recursive state modification APIs is deciding what to do when an operation fails after you've already made changes to the state of the disk.

shutil.rmtree fortunately provides some good precedent there, but it does mean this feature would need to be implemented as its own API, rather than as an option on shutil.chown.

Cheers,

Nick.