File PermissionsLesson 42Free preview

Bash Ownership (chown)

This lesson is part of Bash · All levels

Summary

The chown command changes the file owner to another user, and can simultaneously replace the group with the user:group format. These changes can generally only be made by root, for example after a file is created by a particular process. Option -R makes the change to be recursive to the entire contents of the directory.

Key points

Chown user file replaces owner
Chown user:group file replaces owner and group
R applies to all the contents of the directory
Usually requires sudo

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