Anonymise a folder

readme.md

Anonymise.sh

This script makes the metadata of all files in the execution directory unknown. It changes the owner to "nobody" and sets the creation date as well as the modification date to 01.01.2001 12:00.

anonymise.sh

#!/bin/bash

echo "Are you sure you want to anonymise this directory?"
select yn in "Yes" "No"; do
    case $yn in
        Yes )
            shopt -s dotglob
            for f in * **/* ; do
                sudo chown nobody "$f"
                sudo touch -t 200001011200 "$f"
            done;
            shopt -u dotglob
            exit;;
        No ) exit;;
    esac
done

Hi, I found your website and came to say, keep up the great work! And a little note, always quote variables in sh/bash, as in "$f". Otherwise they will be split at whitespace (before i.e. chown can see them) and even undergo glob expansion and possibly other things happen.

Thanks a lot for the compliment, I appreciate it! ☺️
Didn't know about quoting variables, but that makes perfect sense. Thanks a lot for bringing it up. I updated the Gist accordingly.