Chown

From Free net encyclopedia

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.

1 Usage
- 1.1 Footnotes
2 Usage examples
3 See also
4 External links

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Usage

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This command requires privileged access.
Note: The chown command requires privileged access to a Unix-like system. In most cases, this means assuming the role of the Superuser.

The general syntax for the chown command is:

chown [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.

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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).

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Usage examples

# chown root /var/run/httpd.pid

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

# chown nobody:nobody /tmp /var/tmp

Change the owner of /tmp and /var/tmp to 'nobody' (the standard name for Nobody).
Changes the group associated with the same targets to 'nobody' (the standard group corresponding to Nobody).