How to change the ownership of a file/directory – Unix/Linux

The owners of a file/dir under Linux are lisred below:
1, Owner
2, Group
3, Others

You can change the ownership of a file/dir by using the ‘chown’ command.
Syntax:

# chown newowner file/dir 

Example:

[[email protected] ~]# touch crybit
[[email protected] ~]# ll crybit
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Feb  1 05:01 crybit
-----
[[email protected] ~]# chown crybit crybit
[[email protected] ~]# ll crybit
-rw-r--r--. 1 crybit root 0 Feb  1 05:01 crybit

Changed the ownership from root to user crybit.

How to change the ownership recursively?
Use the switch ‘R’ to do the ownership change recursively.
Example:

[[email protected] ~]# mkdir dir
[[email protected] ~]# cd dir/
[[email protected] dir]# touch a{1..5}.txt
[[email protected] dir]# ll
total 0
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Feb  1 05:09 a1.txt
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Feb  1 05:09 a2.txt
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Feb  1 05:09 a3.txt
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Feb  1 05:09 a4.txt
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Feb  1 05:09 a5.txt

Change the ownership recursively by using the switch ‘R’

[[email protected] dir]# cd ..
[[email protected] ~]# chown -R crybit dir/
[[email protected] ~]# cd -
/root/dir
[[email protected] dir]# ll
total 0
-rw-r--r--. 1 crybit root 0 Feb  1 05:09 a1.txt
-rw-r--r--. 1 crybit root 0 Feb  1 05:09 a2.txt
-rw-r--r--. 1 crybit root 0 Feb  1 05:09 a3.txt
-rw-r--r--. 1 crybit root 0 Feb  1 05:09 a4.txt
-rw-r--r--. 1 crybit root 0 Feb  1 05:09 a5.txt

That’s it!! 🙂

Related Links:
chgrp, groupdel, groupmems, groupmod, useradd , usermod .
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