- Chown
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 theSuperuser . Unprivileged (regular) users who wish to change the group of a file that they own may usechgrp .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)ee also
*
chmod
*chgrp External links
* [http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~dicke3/nerspcs/chown.html chown manual page]
* [http://www.linfo.org/chown.html The chown Command] by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)
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