CHOWN

chown ? change file owner and group

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

This manual page documents the GNU version of chown. chown changes the user and/or group ownership of each given file, according to its first non-option argument, which is interpreted as follows. If only 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 user name is followed by a colon or dot 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 or dot 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 or dot and group are given, but the user name is omitted, only the group of the files is changed; in this case, chown performs the same function as chgrp.

Change the owner and/or group of each FILE to OWNER and/or GROUP.

?c, ??changes

like verbose but report only when a change is made

??dereference

affect the referent of each symbolic link, rather than the symbolic link itself

?h, ??no?dereference

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

?f, ??silent, ??quiet

suppress most error messages

??reference=RFILE

use RFILE’s owner and group rather than the specified OWNER.GROUP values

?R, ??recursive

operate on files and directories recursively

?v, ??verbose

output a diagnostic for every file processed

??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 period. A colon may replace the period.

Written by David MacKenzie.

Report bugs to <bug-fileutils@gnu.org>.

Copyright © 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

The full documentation for chown is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info and chown programs are properly installed at your site, the command

info chown

should give you access to the complete manual.