3.7 File Maintenance Commands

3.7.6 chown - change ownership

Ownership of a file can be changed with the chown command. On most versions of Unix this can only be done by the super-user, i.e. a normal user can't give away ownership of their files. chown is used as below, where # represents the shell prompt for the super-user:

Syntax

chown [options] user[:group] file (SVR4)

chown [options] user[.group] file (BSD)

Common Options

-R recursively descend through the directory structure

-f force, and don't report any errors

Examples

# chown new_owner file

Introduction to Unix - 14 AUG 1996

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