Just messed up a server misusing chown, how to execute it correctly?

Question

I'm moving from an old shared host to a dedicated server at MediaTemple. The server is running Plesk CP, but, as far as I can tell, there's no way via the Interface to do what I want to do.

On the old shared host, running cPanel, I creative a .zip archive of all the website's files. I downloaded this to my computer, then uploaded it with FTP to the new host account I'd set up.

Finally, I logged in via SSH, navigated to the directory the zip was stored in (something like var/www/vhosts/mysite.com/httpdocs/ and ran the unzip command on the file sitearchive.zip. This extracted everything just the fine. The site appeared to work just fine.

The problem: When I tried to edit a file through FTP, I got Error - 160: Permission Denied. When I Get Info for the file I'm trying to edit, it says the owner and group is swimwir1.

I attemped to use chown at this point to change owner - and yes, as you may be able to tell, I'm a little inexperienced in SSH ;) luckily the server was new, since the command I ran - chown -R newuser / appeared to mess a load of stuff up. The reason I used / on the end rather than /var/www/vhosts/mysite.com/httpdocs/ was because I'd already cded into their, so I presumed the / was relative to where I was working. This may be the case, I have no idea, either way - Plesk was no longer accessible, although Apache and things continued to work. I realised my mistake, and deciding it wasn't worth the hassle of 1) being an amateur and 2) trying to fix it, I just reprovisioned the server to start afresh.

So - what do I do to change the owner of these files correctly?

Thanks for helping out a confused beginner!

Jack

Answer 1

Your command does indeed specify an absolute path to the root of the filesystem. Any path that begins with a '/' is absolute. You need:

chown -R newuser .

or:

chown -R newuser /var/www/vhosts/mysite.com/httpdocs