chown

Change file owner and group. Use when adjusting file ownership, typically requires root/sudo.

Quality

80%

Does it follow best practices?

Impact

—

No eval scenarios have been run

Securityby

Advisory

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chown - Change File Owner and Group

Synopsis

chown [OPTION]... [OWNER][:[GROUP]] FILE...
chown [OPTION]... --reference=RFILE FILE...

Change the user and/or group ownership of each FILE.

Flags

Flag	Long Form	Description
-R	--recursive	Operate on files and directories recursively
-v	--verbose	Output a diagnostic for every file processed
-c	--changes	Like -v but only report changes
-f	--silent, --quiet	Suppress most error messages
-h	--no-dereference	Affect symlinks instead of referenced files
	--dereference	Affect the referent of each symlink (default)
	--from=CURRENT_OWNER:GROUP	Change only if current owner/group matches
	--reference=RFILE	Use RFILE's owner and group
-H		With -R, follow symlinks on command line
-L		With -R, follow all symlinks
-P		With -R, never follow symlinks (default)
	--preserve-root	Don't recurse on / (default)
	--no-preserve-root	Allow recursion on /
	--help	Display help
	--version	Output version

Ownership Formats

Format	Effect
OWNER	Change owner only
OWNER:GROUP	Change owner and group
OWNER:	Change owner, set group to owner's login group
:GROUP	Change group only (same as chgrp)

Examples

# Change owner
chown user file.txt

# Change owner and group
chown user:group file.txt

# Change group only
chown :group file.txt

# Recursive ownership change
chown -R user:group dir/

# Verbose output
chown -v user:group file.txt

# Only change if current owner matches
chown --from=olduser newuser file.txt

# Copy ownership from another file
chown --reference=ref.txt target.txt

# Affect symlink itself (not target)
chown -h user:group symlink

# Change owner, set group to user's default
chown user: file.txt

Gotchas

chown typically requires root/sudo privileges. Regular users cannot change file ownership (this is a security feature).
With -R, the default -P does NOT follow symlinks, which is usually what you want to avoid accidentally changing ownership outside the target directory.
chown user:group is preferred over the older chown user.group form, which is ambiguous when usernames contain dots.
--from is useful for safe bulk changes, ensuring you only modify files with the expected current ownership.

Repository: flox/floxenvs
Commit: bb1f07d

Last updated: 5 days ago
Created: 5 days ago

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