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From: weimer@ssd.kodak.com (Gary Weimer)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: root owned files/world writable
Message-ID: <1990Nov15.162559.4098@ssd.kodak.com>
Date: 15 Nov 90 16:25:59 GMT
References: <1990Nov14.224701.15657@cs.odu.edu>
Sender: news@ssd.kodak.com
Distribution: na
Organization: Eastman Kodak
Lines: 34

In article <1990Nov14.224701.15657@cs.odu.edu> epperly@cs.odu.edu (William "Badger" Epperly) writes:
>
[trying to find world-writeable files owned by root. following doesn't work]
>
>find / -user root -ls | awk {'if substr($1,9,1)=w print>test.out

first, syntax for awk is wrong, you want something like:

    awk ' {if (substr($1,9,1) == "w" ) print $8 > "test.out" } '
        ^ ^   ^               ^^ ^ ^ ^       ^^   ^        ^ ^ ^
        1 2   3                4 5 5 3       6    5        5 2 1

1) a single quote needs to surround the <format> of awk
2) currly brackets are also needed for <format>
3) if stmt's condition needs to be surrounded by parens (sp?)
4) equallity is tested using double =
5) all text must be enclosed in quotes, or it is assumed to be a variable
6) you may or may not want to add this to get only the file name

second, find's -ls does not produce the same output as 'ls -al'. It
produces something like:

 9601    1 drwxr-xr-x  3 weimer   staff         512 Nov 13 11:42 file_name

so the command you want to use would be:

find / -user root -ls | awk '{if (substr($3,9,1)=="w") print $11 > "test.out"}'

Hope this helps.

P.S. you might also want to find file owned by root that are group writeable
and are part of some universal group (like 'user').

Gary Weimer