Doing sudo stuff with tramp

Somehow, I accumulated a few files owned by root that should have been owned by me. Below, I'll describe a solution to get rid of them based on dired and tramp.

Step one: open the directory with sudo privileges

I'll obviously need the sudo privilege to change the owner of a file owned by root. Might as well start with that.

Thankfully, I do have a shortcut:

(defun sudired ()
  (interactive)
  (require 'tramp)
  (let ((dir (expand-file-name default-directory)))
    (if (string-match "^/sudo:" dir)
        (user-error "Already in sudo")
      (dired (concat "/sudo::" dir)))))
(define-key dired-mode-map "!" 'sudired)

The function above will open the current directory in sudo mode. I decided to bind it to !, since the default & seems strictly better than !. The function will ask you for the password once. Afterwards, you can open other directories without having to enter the password.

Step two: find-dired

So now, while in sudo mode of the directory in question:

1. Call M-x find-dired. It's not bound by default, and I don't bind it myself since it's quite situational (I do bind find-name-dired to F in dired-mode though).
2. It prompts you for the directory. I just press RET, since the default one is what I need.
3. Next, it prompts for find args. These are the arguments to the UNIX command find. Here, I need to pass -user root.
4. The command has finished and I can see the results. I can select some of them by pressing m (dired-mark) a few times, or mark them all at once with t (dired-toggle-marks).
5. Finally, call O (dired-do-chown) on the marked files and enter oleh.

Done. I'm sure that the admin types can cook up some find-exec-chown combo to do the same thing, but the find-dired approach is both simpler and more flexible, since I can confirm and edit the list of files being changed.