chown

Screenshot of the chown command manual

The chown command is used on Unix-like systems to change the owner of a file. In most implementations, it can only be executed by the Superuser. Unprivileged (regular) users who wish to change the group of a file that they own may use chgrp.

Usage

The general syntax for the chown command is:

chown [-R] [[user]][:group] target1 [[target2 ..]]

• The optional user parameter indicates the new user who should take ownership of the targets.
• The optional group parameter (which must be prefixed with a colon, :) indicates the group with which the targets should be associated.
• The target parameters indicate the files or directories for which the user and/or group will be changed.
• A widely supported option is -R which specifies a recursive change for any named target directory and files within.

Footnotes

• One of either user or group must be specified. The chown command will not execute properly without at least one of those parameters.
• The user and group parameters can be either symbolic names or identifiers (i.e. a User ID or Group ID).

Usage examples

• Note, these commands must be run as root

$ chown root /var/run/httpd.pid

• Change the owner of /var/run/httpd.pid to 'root' (the standard name for the Superuser).

$ chown rob:developers strace.log

• Change the owner of strace.log to 'rob' and the group identifier to 'developers'.

$ chown nobody:nobody /tmp /var/tmp

• Change the owner of /tmp and /var/tmp to ‘nobody’ (not a good idea)
• Change the group associated with the same targets to the group ‘nobody’ (conventionally the ‘nobody’ user's group)

$ chown :512 /home

• Change the group identifier of /home to 512 (regardless of whether a group name is associated with the identifier 512 or not).

$ chown -R us base

• Change the ownership of base to the user us and make it recursive (-R)

See also

• chmod
• chgrp

External links

• chown manual page
• The chown Command by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)