Syntax for 'gam <user> transfer drive select'

[Aston Wooller]

Hey everyone

I'm trying to get my head around recursively transferring ownership of files and subfolders within a folder from one user to another. I want it to work like the native transferral of ownership G Suite supports, but only for a specific folder and its children and not for the rest of the Drive.

It looks like gam <UserTypeEntity> transfer drive in GAMADV-X is the ticket, given that it says I can select a folder using select, or so documentation leads me to believe.

Syntax in GamCommands.txt are:

gam <UserTypeEntity> transfer drive <UserItem> [select <DriveFileEntity>]

        [(targetfolderid <DriveFolderID>)|(targetfoldername <DriveFolderName>)] [targetuserfoldername <DriveFolderName>] [targetuserorphansfoldername <DriveFolderName>]

        [keepuser | (retainrole reader|commenter|writer|editor|none)] [noretentionmessages]

        [nonowner_retainrole reader|commenter|writer|editor|current|none] [nonowner_targetrole reader|commenter|writer|editor|current|none|source]

        (orderby <DriveFileOrderByFieldName> [ascending|descending])*

        [preview] [todrive <ToDriveAttribute>*]

So with this in mind, my test was as follows:

gam user test.a...@example.com transfer drive select 1hDnQ1gGLuXWK2uo1C_WKpg_XLQXDH9vd destinati...@example.com retainrole writer nonowner_targetrole source

The response I get is:

ERROR: 1hDnQ1gGLuXWK2uo1C_WKpg_XLQXDH9vd is not a valid argument for "gam <users> transfer drive"

Then I thought perhaps <UserItem> would need to be entered as an email address of whose ownership I'm trying to change, in addition to the folder, so I tried 

gam user test.a...@example.com transfer drive test.a...@example.com select 1hDnQ1gGLuXWK2uo1C_WKpg_XLQXDH9vd destinati...@example.com retainrole writer nonowner_targetrole source

And the response was:

ERROR: select is not a valid argument for "gam <users> transfer drive"

Is there something I'm missing here? I hope it's something simple.

Am I better off outputting owned files into a csv as mentioned here and then figuring out changing each file's ownership individually?

Thanks

Aston

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[Ross Scroggs]

Aston,

<UserItem>, a required argument, must come before all optional arguments.

gam <UserTypeEntity> transfer drive <UserItem> [select <DriveFileEntity>] ...

So you want:

gam user test.a...@example.com transfer drive destinati...@example.com select 1hDnQ1gGLuXWK2uo1C_WKpg_XLQXDH9vd retainrole writer nonowner_targetrole source

Ross

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[Aston Wooller]

Thanks so much for the reply, Ross. 

I had tried it in that order before with the same error.

Turns out the issue was in running the command from Powershell. Running GAM from the command prompt rather than Powershell made the command work. I'm not sure why it would do this. I notice since updating Windows 10 to 1709 and above Powershell's output is encoded with a Bit Order Mark which ruins all CSVs it generates, but wouldn't have thought that that would affect commands like this.

In any case, thank you for the clarification.

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[Aston Wooller]

To close this one out for anyone who is searching to do the same as I was/am. Ross is right, the correct command is:

gam user <source email> transfer drive <destination email> select <folder id> retainrole writer nonowner_targetrole source

If you have multiple installations of GAM (such as GAMADV-X as well as the standard GAM) and you're running it through Powershell you'll need to enter .\gam when invoking the app. Even though I was within the folder of GAMADV-X, the gam command was running the standard version from another folder where "select" isn't an option.

In conclusion, Ross is a saint.