CHOWN

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: March 2004
Index Return to Main Contents

NAME

chown - change file owner and group

SYNOPSIS

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

DESCRIPTION

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.

OPTIONS

Change the owner and/or group of each FILE to OWNER and/or GROUP. With --reference, change the owner and group of each FILE to those of RFILE.

-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 each symbolic link instead of any referenced file (useful only on systems that can change the ownership of a symlink)
--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.
--no-preserve-root do not treat `/' specially (the default)
--preserve-root: fail to operate recursively on `/'
-f, --silent, --quiet: suppress most error messages
--reference=RFILE: use RFILE's owner and group rather than the specifying OWNER:GROUP values
-R, --recursive: operate on files and directories recursively
-v, --verbose: output a diagnostic for every file processed

The following options modify how a hierarchy is traversed when the -R option is also specified. If more than one is specified, only the final one takes effect.

-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)
--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 `:'. OWNER and GROUP may be numeric as well as symbolic.

AUTHOR

Written by David MacKenzie and Jim Meyering.

REPORTING BUGS

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

COPYRIGHT