RHCSA Practical Lab Series – Finding and Copying User Files

🔍 Lab 10: Searching for Files by User Ownership

📌 Objective

In this lab, you will:

✔ Find all files owned by a specific user (alex)
✔ Copy those files to a designated backup directory (/root/foundfiles)
✔ Verify the copied files

📌 Step 1: Create a Backup Directory

🔹 Create the directory where found files will be copied:

[root@node1 ~]# mkdir /root/foundfiles

📌 Explanation:

• mkdir /root/foundfiles → Creates a directory named foundfiles inside /root.
• This will be used to store all files owned by alex.

📌 Step 2: Search for Files Owned by User alex

🔹 Find all files belonging to alex:

[root@node1 ~]# find / -user alex

📌 Explanation:

• find / → Searches from the root directory / (entire system).
• -user alex → Filters results to show only files owned by alex.

✅ If files are listed, the search was successful.

📌 Step 3: Copy Found Files to /root/foundfiles

🔹 Use find and cp to copy all discovered files:

[root@node1 ~]# find / -user alex -exec cp -a {} /root/foundfiles \;

📌 Explanation:

• find / -user alex → Finds files owned by alex.
• -exec cp -a {} → Copies each found file ({} represents each file).
• /root/foundfiles \; → Destination directory where files will be copied.

✅ Once executed, all files owned by alex will be backed up to /root/foundfiles.

📌 Step 4: Verify Copied Files

🔹 Check the contents of /root/foundfiles to ensure files were copied successfully:

[root@node1 ~]# ls -l /root/foundfiles/

📌 Expected Output:

-rw-r--r-- 1 alex alex  1234 Mar 28 12:34 document1.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 alex alex  5678 Mar 28 12:35 script.sh
...

✅ If files appear, the backup was successful.

📌 Troubleshooting:

• If permission issues arise, try using sudo or running as root.

If no files were copied, ensure that alex owns files on the system:

[root@node1 ~]# find / -user alex

✅ Final Summary

✔ Searched for all files owned by alex
✔ Created a backup directory /root/foundfiles
✔ Successfully copied all user-owned files to the backup location

📌 Next Lab: Extracting Specific Lines from a File 📌 Objective

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