chown(1) — Linux manual page

CHOWN(1)                      User Commands                     CHOWN(1)

NAME

       chown - change file owner and group

SYNOPSIS

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

DESCRIPTION

       This manual page documents the GNU version of chown.  chown
       changes the user and/or group ownership of each given file.  If
       only an owner (a user name or numeric user ID) is given, that
       user is made the owner of each given file, and the files' group
       is not changed.  If the owner is followed by a colon and a group
       name (or numeric group ID), with no spaces between them, the
       group ownership of the files is changed as well.  If a colon but
       no group name follows the user name, that user is made the owner
       of the files and the group of the files is changed to that user's
       login group.  If the colon and group are given, but the owner is
       omitted, only the group of the files is changed; in this case,
       chown performs the same function as chgrp.  If only a colon is
       given, or if the entire operand is empty, neither the owner nor
       the group is changed.

OPTIONS

       Change the owner and/or group of each FILE to OWNER and/or GROUP.
       With --reference, change the owner and group of each FILE to
       those of RFILE.

       -c, --changes
              like verbose but report only when a change is made

       -f, --silent, --quiet
              suppress most error messages

       -v, --verbose
              output a diagnostic for every file processed

       --dereference
              affect the referent of each symbolic link (this is the
              default), rather than the symbolic link itself

       -h, --no-dereference
              affect symbolic links instead of any referenced file
              (useful only on systems that can change the ownership of a
              symlink)

       --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP
              change the ownership of each file only if its current
              owner and/or group match those specified here. Either may
              be omitted, in which case a match is not required for the
              omitted attribute

       --no-preserve-root
              do not treat '/' specially (the default)

       --preserve-root
              fail to operate recursively on '/'

       --reference=RFILE
              use RFILE's ownership rather than specifying values RFILE
              is always dereferenced if a symbolic link.

       -R, --recursive
              operate on files and directories recursively

       The following options modify how a hierarchy is traversed when
       the -R option is also specified.  If more than one is specified,
       only the final one takes effect. '-P' is the default.

       -H     if a command line argument is a symbolic link to a
              directory, traverse it

       -L     traverse every symbolic link to a directory encountered

       -P     do not traverse any symbolic links

       --help display this help and exit

       --version
              output version information and exit

       Owner is unchanged if missing.  Group is unchanged if missing,
       but changed to login group if implied by a ':' following a
       symbolic OWNER.  OWNER and GROUP may be numeric as well as
       symbolic.

EXAMPLES

       chown root /u
              Change the owner of /u to "root".

       chown root:staff /u
              Likewise, but also change its group to "staff".

       chown -hR root /u
              Change the owner of /u and subfiles to "root".

AUTHOR

       Written by David MacKenzie and Jim Meyering.

REPORTING BUGS

       GNU coreutils online help:
       <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
       Report any translation bugs to
       <https://translationproject.org/team/>

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright © 2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc.  License GPLv3+:
       GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
       This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute
       it.  There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

SEE ALSO

       chown(2)

       Full documentation <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/chown>
       or available locally via: info '(coreutils) chown invocation'

COLOPHON

       This page is part of the coreutils (basic file, shell and text
       manipulation utilities) project.  Information about the project
       can be found at ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/⟩.  If you
       have a bug report for this manual page, see
       ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/⟩.  This page was obtained
       from the tarball coreutils-9.5.tar.xz fetched from
       ⟨http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/⟩ on 2024-06-14.  If you
       discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page,
       or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for
       the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the
       information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original
       manual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org

GNU coreutils 9.5              March 2024                       CHOWN(1)

Pages that refer to this page: chgrp(1), chown(2), fd(4), hd(4), initrd(4), lp(4), mem(4), null(4), ram(4), tty(4), ttyS(4), symlink(7), sm-notify(8), start-stop-daemon(8), statd(8)

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