I have copied and pasted a directory of files into another.
The result is now this one development\ /
I do not know what that means? Linux does not even recognize it as a directory now.
Also the owner of this directory is wrong. But when I try to do this chown -R zugul /development, the result is: chown: cannot access `/development': No such file or directory
Looks like something went wrong when I have pasted the copied directory. How can I fix this issue?
Your directory name seems to have a space in it.
You can either use quotes:
chown -R zugul "/development /" Or you can use escape characters:
chown -R zugul /development\ / 
mv "/development " "/development". Or you can add %20 to your URL: foo.com/development%20 Your directory name ends with a space (probably a regular space, but it could be some other blank character like an unbreakable space). Depending on what options you passed to ls, the \ either is in the file name or indicates that the next character is to be interpreted literally as part of the file name.
You'll want to rename the directory:
mv /development\ /development (note the two consecutive spaces: the first is part of the file name and quoted by the preceding backslash, and the second space separates the two arguments). Or
mv '/development ' /development If there is already a directory called /development, move the files from the /development directory to /development then remove the badly-named directory (rmdir '/development '). Watch out for conflicts (files existing in both).
Once you've settled the naming issue, take care of other things such as ownership.
The filename is incorrect when you try to chown; try instead chown -R zugul development\\\ /.
Don't think this belongs to stackoverflow but basically you can do one of 2 things:
chown -R zugul /development* If you have multiple /development directories it's a problem. Or
chown -R zugul "/development /" In general though you might want to avoid making "development" directories part of the / level. These usually belong to /home/zugul/ somewhere.
Unless you copied the folder as root you won't see it in /. So either your operation failed or the folder in some other directory. If it is in some other directory then you need to do:
cd <dest directory> sudo chown -R zugul "development /" Instead of guessing what the character is, use something that quotes the special chars. I like this method:
ls --quoting-style=shell-escape
That shows what it actually is (using bash/ksh-style $'' strings which handle ANSII C escapes). As a bonus, that should give you a pre-quoted string that you can directly pass to chown or whatever else you need to do in the shell. For example, here's a file with a newline in the name, showing the ls output and then using the pre-quoted ls output for chgrp and rm:
sauer@lightning:/tmp/test> ls -l total 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 sauer users 0 Aug 14 17:04 a?file sauer@lightning:/tmp/test> ls -l --quoting-style=shell-escape total 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 sauer users 0 Aug 14 17:04 'a'$'\n''file' sauer@lightning:/tmp/test> chgrp docker 'a'$'\n''file' sauer@lightning:/tmp/test> ls -l --quoting-style=shell-escape total 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 sauer docker 0 Aug 14 17:04 'a'$'\n''file' sauer@lightning:/tmp/test> rm -v 'a'$'\n''file' removed 'a'$'\n''file' I'd suggest renaming the file to something without weird chars. :)
sauer@lightning:/tmp/test> ls a??file sauer@lightning:/tmp/test> ls --quoting-style=shell-escape 'a'$'\t\033''file' sauer@lightning:/tmp/test> mv -v 'a'$'\t\033''file' regular_filename renamed 'a'$'\t\033''file' -> 'regular_filename' 