I am trying to figure what I am doing wrong here.
find . '!' -user $USER -ls
andy@7_~/Downloads$
Has a value been assigned to variable andy ?
I made an edit to my post.
1) DON'T - seriously - edit a post when others have answered referencing it, making their post look silly!
2) Does your problem persist (not for me!)? Or has a new one surfaced?
Alright -- now that you've edited it, what is the value of $USER when you run it? It's acting like its blank.
@Corona688: Sorry I disagree. It's acting as if every single file in the current working directory and below belonged to $USER. Were $USER empty, we'd have the error from the original post.
I edited because I made a mistake. I am human.
You did not look silly.
--- Post updated at 11:58 AM ---
andy@7_~$ find . '!' -user $andy -ls
find: �-ls' is not the name of a known user
I did
sudo chown -R andy /home/andy/
because some files in home were not owned by me.
Here is what it PREVIOUSLY looked like.
Is andy - NOT $andy - the user name?
You realize $ means "variable", right? If you didn't set the variable $andy to anything, it won't be set to anything.
USER="andy"
find . '!' -user "$USER" -ls
If you just wanted the literal string "andy", use "andy".
Thanks.