How do I chown to inherit parent directory's owner and group or the current account user

Question

In terminal I know I can

chown whatever:whatever .*

What I want to do is dynamically set username and group to the current domain owner rather than root. Is there an easy way to do this?

Some background: I'm pushing to my server using Git as root then checking out to public_html. This makes any new files and directories owned by root:root. I want to add a line to hooks/post-receive to change the owner to the domain user rather than root but I don't want to have to specify the domain user explicitly if I don't have to.

Answer 1

The simples think I could think of is

chown -R `stat . -c %u:%g` *

You might also use $(...) instead of backticks here.