CODEOWNERS Drift Audit

Wrong skill? PR reviewer auto-assignment → not this skill (read-only audit only). Blast radius of a code change → blast-radius-check.

Source: superpowers-plus Part of: Engineering Rigor skill family

When to Use

• CODEOWNERS hasn't been reviewed in a while and ownership may have drifted
• Files or directories seem to lack a clear owner
• A rule in CODEOWNERS may no longer match anything (renamed/deleted paths)
• An owner reference (@user, @org/team) may be stale or misspelled

How to Run

Run the single script below via bash (enforced at runtime, see Failure Modes). Locates CODEOWNERS (.github/, then root, then docs/ -- GitHub's own order), finds unowned files, dead rules, and invalid owners. Stateless.

Exit code: exit 0 with all three === headers printed means complete. Anything else is an incomplete audit -- never read that as "no issues found."

Large-repo advisory: cap FILES_ARR post-build for a quick sample (e.g. FILES_ARR=("${FILES_ARR[@]:0:100}")) -- but this also caps Step 2 (Dead Rules); see the Failure Modes row before deleting a rule it flags.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

# -- Step 0: Preconditions --
# Under zsh, matches_pattern()'s case-glob silently mismatches everything.
if [ -z "${BASH_VERSION:-}" ]; then
  echo "ERROR: this script requires bash -- re-run as 'bash <this-script>'" >&2; exit 1
fi
if ! git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  echo "ERROR: not inside a git working tree" >&2; exit 1
fi
# CODEOWNERS candidates and git ls-files are both cwd-relative -- root first.
cd "$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)" || { echo "ERROR: cannot cd to repo root" >&2; exit 1; }

CODEOWNERS_PATH=""
for candidate in .github/CODEOWNERS CODEOWNERS docs/CODEOWNERS; do
  [ -f "$candidate" ] && { CODEOWNERS_PATH="$candidate"; break; }
done
if [ -z "$CODEOWNERS_PATH" ]; then
  echo "ERROR: no CODEOWNERS file found" >&2; exit 1
fi
if [ ! -r "$CODEOWNERS_PATH" ]; then
  echo "ERROR: CODEOWNERS found but not readable: $CODEOWNERS_PATH" >&2; exit 1
fi
echo "CODEOWNERS: $CODEOWNERS_PATH"

# Match gitignore-style; anchoring MUST be decided before "/" is stripped
# (see Failure Modes for the anchoring/globstar regressions this fixes).
matches_pattern() {
  local f="$1" pattern="$2"
  local anchored=0
  case "$pattern" in
    '**/'*) pattern="${pattern#\*\*/}" ;;
    *)
      case "${pattern%/}" in
        */*) anchored=1 ;;
      esac
      ;;
  esac
  pattern="${pattern#/}"
  pattern="${pattern%/}"
  # gitignore's "/**/ " also matches zero intervening dirs.
  local pattern2="${pattern//\/\*\*\//\/}"
  if [ "$anchored" -eq 1 ]; then
    # shellcheck disable=SC2254
    case "$f" in
      $pattern|$pattern/*|$pattern2|$pattern2/*) return 0 ;;
    esac
  else
    # shellcheck disable=SC2254
    case "$f" in
      $pattern|$pattern/*|*/$pattern|*/$pattern/*|$pattern2|$pattern2/*|*/$pattern2|*/$pattern2/*) return 0 ;;
    esac
  fi
  return 1
}

# Rules (GitLab [Section] headers excluded, trailing "# comment" text and any
# CRLF stripped so neither pollutes Step 3's owner-token field split below).
RULES=$(grep -Ev '^\s*(#|$|\[)' "$CODEOWNERS_PATH" 2>/dev/null | tr -d '\r' | sed -E 's/[[:space:]]*#.*$//' || true)
echo "Rules: $(echo "$RULES" | grep -c . || true)"

# NUL-delimited into an array: git ls-files -z is never C-quoted, unlike
# newline-delimited output (handles non-ASCII/backslash filenames correctly).
FILES_ARR=()
while IFS= read -r -d '' f; do
  FILES_ARR+=("$f")
done < <(git ls-files -z)
echo "Tracked files: ${#FILES_ARR[@]}"

# -- Step 1: Unowned files --
echo ""
echo "=== Unowned Files ==="
for f in "${FILES_ARR[@]+"${FILES_ARR[@]}"}"; do
  owned=0
  while IFS= read -r rule; do
    [ -z "$rule" ] && continue
    read -r pattern _ <<< "$rule"
    if matches_pattern "$f" "$pattern"; then owned=1; break; fi
  done <<RULES_EOF
$RULES
RULES_EOF
  if [ "$owned" -eq 0 ]; then echo "  UNOWNED: $f"; fi
done

# -- Step 2: Dead rules --
echo ""
echo "=== Dead Rules ==="
echo "$RULES" | while IFS= read -r rule; do
  [ -z "$rule" ] && continue
  read -r pattern _ <<< "$rule"
  matched=0
  for f in "${FILES_ARR[@]+"${FILES_ARR[@]}"}"; do
    if matches_pattern "$f" "$pattern"; then matched=1; break; fi
  done
  if [ "$matched" -eq 0 ]; then echo "  DEAD RULE: $rule"; fi
done

# -- Step 3: Owner validity (best-effort) --
echo ""
echo "=== Owner Validity ==="
# Check every remote, parsing the actual hostname (see Failure Modes).
IS_GITHUB=0
for remote_name in $(git remote 2>/dev/null); do
  remote_url=$(git remote get-url "$remote_name" 2>/dev/null) || continue
  remote_host=$(printf '%s\n' "$remote_url" | sed -E 's#^[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9+.-]*://##; s#^[^@/]*@##; s#[:/].*##')
  if [ "$remote_host" = "github.com" ]; then IS_GITHUB=1; break; fi
done

# gh only for github.com, glab only otherwise (prevents cross-API misvalidation).
HAS_GH=0
if [ "$IS_GITHUB" -eq 1 ] && command -v gh >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  if gh auth status >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    HAS_GH=1
  else
    echo "  ADVISORY: gh not authenticated -- owner check skipped"
  fi
fi

HAS_GLAB=0
if [ "$IS_GITHUB" -eq 0 ] && command -v glab >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  if glab auth status >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    HAS_GLAB=1
  else
    echo "  ADVISORY: glab not authenticated -- owner check skipped"
  fi
fi

if [ "$HAS_GH" -eq 0 ] && [ "$HAS_GLAB" -eq 0 ]; then
  echo "  ADVISORY: owner verification skipped -- no authenticated CLI matching this remote's type on PATH"
  echo "  (unowned-file and dead-rule results above are unaffected -- CLI is only needed for owner validity)"
else
  echo "$RULES" \
    | awk '{for(i=2;i<=NF;i++) print $i}' \
    | sort -u \
    | while IFS= read -r owner; do
        [ -z "$owner" ] && continue
        # Email-format: non-@ char before @ + dot after @ = email, not username
        case "$owner" in
          [!@]*@*.*) echo "  UNVERIFIABLE: $owner (email-format)"; continue ;;
        esac
        # No "@" and not email-shaped: not a valid CODEOWNERS owner reference
        case "$owner" in
          @*) : ;;
          *) echo "  UNVERIFIABLE: $owner (missing @ prefix)"; continue ;;
        esac
        slug="${owner#@}"
        if [ "$HAS_GH" -eq 1 ]; then
          # Distinguish team refs (@org/team) from user refs (@user)
          if echo "$slug" | grep -q '/'; then
            if gh api "orgs/${slug%%/*}/teams/${slug##*/}" --silent 2>/dev/null; then
              echo "  VALID: $owner"
            else
              echo "  NOT_FOUND: $owner"
            fi
          else
            if gh api "users/${slug}" --silent 2>/dev/null; then
              echo "  VALID: $owner"
            else
              echo "  NOT_FOUND: $owner"
            fi
          fi
        elif [ "$HAS_GLAB" -eq 1 ]; then
          # glab users?username= exits 0 even for empty results -- inspect body
          ubody=$(glab api "users?username=${slug}" 2>/dev/null || echo "[]")
          # URL-encode slash for namespaced group paths (e.g. myorg/myteam -> myorg%2Fmyteam)
          encoded_slug=$(printf '%s' "$slug" | sed 's|/|%2F|g')
          gbody=$(glab api "groups/${encoded_slug}" 2>/dev/null || echo "{}")
          if echo "$ubody" | grep -q '"username"' || echo "$gbody" | grep -q '"full_path"'; then
            echo "  VALID: $owner"
          else
            echo "  NOT_FOUND: $owner"
          fi
        else
          echo "  UNVERIFIABLE: $owner (no matching CLI for remote type)"
        fi
      done
fi
echo ""
echo "=== Done. Review UNOWNED/DEAD RULE/NOT_FOUND lines above. ==="

Companion Skills

• blast-radius-check — Before modifying code that a drifted CODEOWNERS rule might miss
• pre-commit-gate — Pre-commit checks independent of ownership review

Failure Modes

Top rows only -- see reference.md for the full table.