How to change file and directories Ownership in Linux

This blog post will explain that how to change file and directories Ownership in Linux using the chown and chgrp commands.

Changing File Ownership

• Only root can change a file’s owner
• Only root or the owner can change a file’s group
• Ownership is changed with chown:
  • chown {-R} user_name file|directory...
• Group-Ownership is changed with chgrp:
  • chgrp [-R] group_name file|directory...

File ownership can be changed with the chown command. For example, to grant ownership of the file “test.txt” to amar, the following command could be used:

 sudo chown amar test.txt

chown can be used with the -R option to recursively change the ownership of an entire directory tree. The following command would grant ownership of testdir and all files and subdirectories within it to student:

sudo chown -R amar testdir/

Only root can change the ownership of a file. Group ownership, however, can be set by root or the file’s owner. root can grant ownership to any group, while non-root users can grant ownership only to groups they belong to. Changing the group ownership of a file is done with the chgrp command. The syntax is identical to that of chown, including the use of -R to affect entire directory trees.