Linux Chown Command Examples to Change Owner and Group

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The concept of owner and groups for files is fundamental to Linux. Every file is associated with an owner and a group. You can use chown and chgrp commands to change the owner or the group of a particular file or directory.

In this article, we will discuss the ‘chown’ command as it covers most part of the ‘chgrp’ command also.

1. Change the owner of a file

$ls -l filename
-rw-r--r-- 1 srinu chilukuri 0 2013-10-16 20:03 filename

$ chown root filename

$ls -l filename
-rw-r--r-- 1 root chilukuri 0 2013-10-16 20:05 filename

So we see that the owner of the file was changed from ‘srinu’ to ‘root’.


2. Change the group of a file
Through the chown command, the group (that a file belongs to) can also be changed.

$ls -l filename
-rw-r--r-- 1 srinu chilukuri 0 2013-10-16 20:03 filename

$ chown :friends filename

$ls -l filename
-rw-r--r-- 1 root friends 0 2013-10-16 20:06 filename

If you observe closely, the group of the file changed from ‘chilukuri’ to ‘friends’. So we see that by just adding a ‘:’ followed by the new group name, the group of the file can be changed.

3. Change both owner and the group

$ls -l filename
-rw-r--r-- 1 root friends 0 2013-10-16 20:03 filename

$ chown srinu:chilukuri filename

$ls -l filename
-rw-r--r-- 1 srinu chilukuri 0 2013-10-16 20:06 filename

So we see that using the syntax newOwner:newGroup, the owner as well as group can be changed in one go.