NAME¶

chown - Change file owner and group

SYNOPSIS¶

chown [--help] [-c|--changes] [--from] [--preserve-root] [--no-preserve-root] [--quiet] [-R|--recursive] [--reference] [-f|--silent] [-v|--verbose] [-H ] [-L ] [-P ] [--dereference] [-h|--no-dereference] [-V|--version]

DESCRIPTION¶

Change file owner and group

OPTIONS¶

--help

Print help information.

-c, --changes

like verbose but report only when a change is made

--from <CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP>

change the owner and/or group of each file only if its current owner and/or group match those specified here. Either may be omitted, in which case a match is not required for the omitted attribute

--preserve-root

fail to operate recursively on '/'

--no-preserve-root

do not treat '/' specially (the default)

--quiet

suppress most error messages

-R, --recursive

operate on files and directories recursively

--reference <RFILE>

use RFILE's owner and group rather than specifying OWNER:GROUP values

-f, --silent

-v, --verbose

output a diagnostic for every file processed

-H

if a command line argument is a symbolic link to a directory, traverse it

-L

traverse every symbolic link to a directory encountered

-P

do not traverse any symbolic links (default)

--dereference

affect the referent of each symbolic link (this is the default), rather than the symbolic link itself

-h, --no-dereference

affect symbolic links instead of any referenced file (useful only on systems that can change the ownership of a symlink)

-V, --version

Print version

VERSION¶

v(uutils coreutils) 0.9.0

EXAMPLES¶

Change the owner user of a file/directory:

sudo chown user path/to/file_or_directory

Change the owner user and group of a file/directory:

sudo chown user:group path/to/file_or_directory

Change the owner user and group to both have the name `user`:

sudo chown user: path/to/file_or_directory

Change the group of a file to a group that the current user belongs to:

chown :group path/to/file_or_directory

Recursively change the owner of a directory and its contents:

sudo chown [-R|--recursive] user path/to/directory

Change the owner of a symbolic link:

sudo chown [-h|--no-dereference] user path/to/symlink

Change the owner of a file/directory to match a reference file:

sudo chown --reference path/to/reference_file path/to/file_or_directory

The examples are provided by the tldr-pages project <https://tldr.sh> under the CC BY 4.0 License. Please note that, as uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail.