To change the owner and group owner of a file or directory, we use chown
(short for change owner). To change a new group, use the similar command chgrp
.
We must have root permissions to use this command.
The syntax for chown
is as follows:
$ chown [options] [owner]:[group] files
The syntax for chgrp
is very similar:
$ chgrp [options] newgroup files
Here are some functionalities of chown
and chgrp
that are used in the real world.
To change the file owner, specify the user, then the file name.
$ chown bob sampleFile.txt
The sampleFile.txt file will change user to bob.
To change the file's group owner, we set the group name after a colon (:
). This provides the same function as chgrp
command.
$ chown :programmers todo-list.txt
$ chgrp programmers todo-list.txt
$ chown bob:redditors sampleFile.txt
Here, we are changing the sampleFile.txt. The argument before the : indicates the new user, while the argument after shows the new group.
To recursively grant ownership of a directory and all files with subdirectories within, use the -R
option.
$ chown -R bob /files/folder
Let's go through an example with two users: marie and bob.
marie has access to sudo commands, and wants to copy a file into bob's home directory. She would like to give bob the ownership.
$ sudo cp sampleFile.txt ~bob
Password:
# Copied file to bob's homepage.
$ sudo ls -l ~bob/sampleFile.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 marie staff 2014-01-13 16:00 /home/bob/sampleFile.txt
# bob only has read access to this file.
$ sudo chown bob: ~bob/sampleFile.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 bob bob 2014-01-13 16:00 /home/bob/sampleFile.txt
# Now bob has ownership and has write access.
Command Line Kung Fu is packed with dozens of tips and practical real-world examples. You won't find theoretical examples in this book. The examples demonstrate how to solve actual problems. The tactics are easy to find, too. Each chapter covers a specific topic and groups related tips and examples together.
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