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CHOWN (1)

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chown, chgrp - change owner or group

CONTENTS

Synopsis
Description
Files
See Also
Notes

chown [-hHLPR] owner[:group] file ...

chgrp [-hHLPR] group file ...

Chown changes the owner of the files to owner, and, if group is present, the group-ID of the files to group. Both owner and group may be either a decimal UID / GID or a login / group name found in the password file.

Chgrp changes the group-ID of the files to group. The group may be either a decimal GID or a group name found in the group-ID file.

Both chown and chgrp accept the following options:

-h	When a symbolic link is encountered, change the owner and group of the link itself, rather than the file it refers to.
-R	Recursively descend into each file operand. Whether owner and group of a symbolic link are changed depends on the -h option, but the link is not followed otherwise.
The following options have been introduced by POSIX.1-2001:
-H	With the -R option, if a symbolic link given on the command line points to a directory, follow that symbolic link and change owner and group in the files below, but do not handle any other symbolic links specially.
-L	With the -R option, whenever a symbolic link is encountered that points to a directory, follow the symbolic link and change owner and group in the files below,
-P	With the -R option, do not follow any symbolic links, but change owner and group of the links themselves.

/etc/passwd
/etc/group

chown(2), passwd(5), group(5)

Permission to change owner and group is based either on historical System V behaviour, which is to allow the owner of the file or a privileged user a change to any value; or on historical BSD behaviour, which is to restrict changing the owner to a privileged user and changing the group to a group to which the file owner belongs.

The [:group] argument to chown has been introduced with POSIX.2 and is not available on older implementations of System V.