How to Use chown in Linux

The chown command stands for ‘Change Owner’; it is used to change the owner and group of files, directories, and symbolic links in the system.

To better understand its function, it’s important to know that in Linux, every file and directory is assigned three types of owner attributes:

• User: The User is the one who owns the file,
• Group: Group includes other users who are in the file’s group, and ,
• Others: Users that are not in the file’s group.

Each of these categories can have different permission levels for reading, writing, and executing the files.

The chown command allows you to change the User and Group ownership of a file or directory.

chown typically requires administrative (root) privileges to run. If you’re not logged in as root, you’ll likely need to use sudo before the command, like sudo chown user:group filename, to make changes.

Here are some ways to use the chown command:

1. Change the Owner

The basic syntax for changing the owner is chown owner filename.

Example :

To change the owner of a file named file.txt to user1, you would use:

chown user1 file.txt

2. Change the Owner and Group

You can change the owner and group at the same time by separating the owner and group with a : (colon).

Example :

To change the owner of file.txt to user1 and the group to group1, you would use:

chown user1:group1 file.txt

3. Change the Owner of a Directory and Its Contents

You can change the owner of a directory and all its contents using the -R (or --recursive) option.

Example :

To change the owner of a directory named dir and all its contents to user1, you would use:

chown -R user1 dir

4. Change the Owner of All Files in a Directory

To change the owner of all files in a directory without changing the owner of the directory itself or any subdirectories, you can use the * wildcard.

Example:

chown user1 dir/*

5. Change the Group Only

If you want to change the group without changing the owner, you can do so by prefixing the group with a : (colon).

Example:

To change the group of file.txt to group1, you would use:

chown :group1 file.txt

6. Change the Owner and Group to the Login User

You can change the owner and group of a file or directory to the login user without specifying the user name.

Example:

chown $USER:$USER file.txt

More Linux commands: