CHOWN

Section: Misc. Reference Manual Pages (8 )
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BSD mandoc
BSD 4  

NAME

chown - change file owner and group  

SYNOPSIS

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

DESCRIPTION

Chown sets the user ID and/or the group ID of the specified files.

The options are as follows:

-R
Change the user ID and/or the group ID for the file hierarchies rooted in the files instead of just the files themselves.
-f
Don't report any failure to change file owner or group, nor modify the exit status to reflect such failures.

The owner and group operands are both optional, however, one must be specified. If the group operand is specified, it must be preceded by a colon (``:'') character.

The owner may be either a numeric user ID or a user name. If a user name is also a numeric user ID, the operand is used as a user name. The group may be either a numeric group ID or a group name. If a group name is also a numeric group ID, the operand is used as a group name.

The ownership of a file may only be altered by a super-user for obvious security reasons.

The owner and group of symbolic links are themselves changed instead of the file to which the link points.

The chown utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.  

COMPATIBILITY

Previous versions of the chown utility used the dot (``.'') character to distinguish the group name. This has been changed to be a colon (``:'') character so that user and group names may contain the dot character.  

SEE ALSO

chgrp(1), find(1), chown(2)  

STANDARDS

The chown command is expected to be POSIX 1003.2 compliant.


 

Index

NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
COMPATIBILITY
SEE ALSO
STANDARDS

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Time: 21:51:41 GMT, February 23, 2023