chown

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The chown command (abbreviation for change owner) is used on Unix-like systems to change the owner of a file. In most implementations,[citation needed] it can only be executed by the superuser, to prevent users simply changing ownership of files that aren't theirs to access. Unprivileged (regular) users who wish to change the group of a file that they own may use chgrp.

Usage examples [edit]

These examples illustrate typical syntax and use. Modifying permissions requires you are either root or have write access to the file. Changing owner requires root privilege.

  • Change the owner of /var/run/httpd.pid to 'root' (the standard name for the Superuser).
 # chown root /var/run/httpd.pid
  • Change the owner of strace.log to 'rob' and the group identifier to 'developers'.
 # chown rob:developers strace.log
  • Change the owner of /tmp and /var/tmp to ‘nobody’ (not a good idea), and change the group of /tmp and /var/tmp to ‘nogroup
 # chown nobody:nogroup /tmp /var/tmp
  • Change the group identifier of /home to 512 (regardless of whether a group name is associated with the identifier 512 or not).
 # chown :512 /home
  • Change the ownership of base to the user foouser and make it recursive (-R)
 # chown -R foouser base
  • Change the ownership to newuser and group to newgroup for all of the files and directories in current directory, and all subdirectories (recursively).
 # chown -R newuser:newgroup .

See also [edit]

External links [edit]