chown

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

Change file owner and group

Options

--help

Print help information.

--changes, -c

like verbose but report only when a change is made

--from=<CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP>

change the owner and/or group 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

--preserve-root

fail to operate recursively on ‘/’

--no-preserve-root

do not treat ‘/’ specially (the default)

--quiet

suppress most error messages

--recursive, -R

operate on files and directories recursively

--reference=<RFILE>

use RFILE’s owner and group rather than specifying OWNER:GROUP values

--silent, -f

--verbose, -v

output a diagnostic for every file processed

-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:

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

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

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

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

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

Change the group of a file to a group that the current user belongs to:

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

Recursively change the owner of a directory and its contents:

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

Change the owner of a symbolic link:

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

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

sudo 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.