Changing ownership (chown) and permissions (chmod)

You’ll use two commands to change ownership and permissions on files: chown and chmod.

chown

chown (change owner) is used to change owner and group of a file. Usage is

chown [OPTION]... [OWNER][:[GROUP]] FILE...

For example, imagine we have this file:

$ ls -lh testfile 
-rw-r--r-- 1 dave dave 10 Aug 14 16:18 testfile

Change owner

Let’s change the owner to chris (presuming there’s a chris user on the system):

$ chown chris testfile
$ ls -lh testfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris dave 10 Aug 14 16:18 testfile

Change owner and group

We’ve changed the owner, but if we wanted to change the group, too, we could have run:

$ chown chris:staff testfile
$ ls -lh testfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 chris staff 10 Aug 14 16:18 testfile

Recursively change owner and group

One common task is changing the owner and group for all files in a given directory. You can do this with the -R or --recursive option:

$ chown -R dave:staff /home...