Problem with multiple admin accounts and file ownership

Question

A while ago I was messing around with my elementary OS setup and ended up crashing my main admin account. I'm not sure exactly what I did but essentially every time I would try to login, I would get stuck in a login loop. It would halfway log in and then crash and shoot me back to the login screen.
I stopped using elementary OS for a while because of this and went back to my main OS ubuntuMATE.
Today I realized well, one: I really like the look and feel of elementary OS and two: that I could just create a new account through terminal and add it to the sudo group, successfully creating a new admin account.
It's great I can do everything I need from this account except edit any of the files found in my elementary OS file system as they are all belonging to my main admin account.
How can I go about transferring ownership of all these files to the new admin account and/or delete the old admin account? Would in deleting the former admin account automatically transfer said files? How do I solve this? Thank you for the help in advance.

ZeDD

Answer 1

Here the goal is to allow new admin to access files whose permissions and ownership are under old admin.

In such cases you can do following:

• change the file ownership or

  chown user:group filename 
  

• Add new admin to group old admin

Answer 2

You can do this quite quick with some commands. First you need the uid of your "old admin" and "new admin" account:

$ id -u old-admin

$ id -u new-admin

Let's say "old uid" is 1000 and "new uid" is 2000, the command

$ find /home -uid 1000 -exec chown 2000 {} \; (probably you will need sudo)

will change the ownership of all files owned by "old-admin" recursively in /home to "new-admin".