chown

For the surname, see Chown (surname).

The chown command (abbreviation for change owner) is used on Unix-like systems to change the owner of a file. Unprivileged (regular) users who wish to change the group of a file that they own may use chgrp.

From the BSD man page for chown:

For obvious security reasons, the ownership of a file may only be altered by a super-user. Similarly, only a member of a group can change a file's group ID to that group.

Usage examples

These examples illustrate typical syntax and use. Modifying permissions requires you are either root or have write access to the file. Changing owner requires root privilege.

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

 $ chown root /var/run/httpd.pid

• Change the owner of strace.log to 'rob' and the group identifier to 'developers'.

 $ chown rob:developers strace.log

• Change the owner of /tmp and /var/tmp to ‘nobody’ (not a good idea), and change the group of /tmp and /var/tmp to ‘nogroup’

 $ chown nobody:nogroup /tmp /var/tmp

• Change the group identifier of /home to 512 (regardless of whether a group name is associated with the identifier 512 or not).

 $ chown :512 /home

• Change the ownership of base to the user foouser and make it recursive (-R)

 $ chown -R foouser base

• Change the ownership to newuser and group to newgroup for all of the files and directories in current directory, and all subdirectories (recursively).

 $ chown -R newuser:newgroup .

See also

• chgrp
• chmod
• takeown

External links

• chown – Commands & Utilities Reference, The Single UNIX® Specification, Issue 7 from The Open Group
• chown manual page
• The chown Command by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)