chown

Options

--help

chown-help-print-help

--changes, -c

chown-help-changes

--from=<CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP>

chown-help-from

--preserve-root

chown-help-preserve-root

--no-preserve-root

chown-help-no-preserve-root

--quiet

chown-help-quiet

--recursive, -R

chown-help-recursive

--reference=<RFILE>

chown-help-reference

--silent, -f

--verbose, -v

chown-help-verbose

-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 (default)

--dereference

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

--no-dereference, -h

affect symbolic links instead of any referenced file (useful only on systems that can change the ownership of a symlink)

Examples

Change the owner user of a file/directory:

chown {{user}} {{path/to/file_or_directory}}

Change the owner user and group of a file/directory:

chown {{user}}:{{group}} {{path/to/file_or_directory}}

Change the owner user and group to both have the name user:

chown {{user}}: {{path/to/file_or_directory}}

Recursively change the owner of a directory and its contents:

chown {{[-R|--recursive]}} {{user}} {{path/to/directory}}

Change the owner of a symbolic link:

chown {{[-h|--no-dereference]}} {{user}} {{path/to/symlink}}

Change the owner of a file/directory to match a reference file:

chown --reference {{path/to/reference_file}} {{path/to/file_or_directory}}

The examples are provided by the tldr-pages project under the CC BY 4.0 License.

Please note that, as uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail.