CHOWN(8) | System Manager's Manual | CHOWN(8) |
chown
— change
file owner and group
chown |
[-R [-H |
-L | -P ]]
[-dfhv ]
owner[:group]
file ... |
chown |
[-R [-H |
-L | -P ]]
[-dfhv ] :group
file ... |
chown |
[-R [-H |
-L | -P ]]
[-dfhv ] --reference=rfile
file ... |
chown
sets the user ID and/or the group ID
of the specified files. Symbolic links named by arguments are silently left
unchanged unless -h
is used.
The options are as follows:
-H
-R
option is specified, symbolic links on
the command line are followed. (Symbolic links encountered in the tree
traversal are not followed.)-L
-R
option is specified, all symbolic links
are followed.-P
-R
option is specified, no symbolic links
are followed.-R
-d
-f
-h
-v
chown
to be verbose, showing files as they
are processed.The -H
, -L
and
-P
options are ignored unless the
-R
option is specified. In addition, these options
override each other and the command's actions are determined by the last one
specified. The default is as if the -P
option had
been specified.
The -L
option cannot be used together with
the -h
option.
The owner and group
operands are both optional, however, one must be specified; alternatively,
both the owner and group may be specified using a reference
rfile specified using the
--reference
argument. If the
group operand is specified, it must be preceded by a
colon (``:'') character.
The owner may be either a user name or a numeric user ID. The group may be either a group name or a numeric group ID. Since it is valid to have a user or group name that is numeric (and does not have the numeric ID that matches its name) the name lookup is always done first. Preceding an ID with a ``#'' character will force it to be taken as a number.
The ownership of a file may only be altered by a super-user for obvious security reasons.
Unless invoked by the super-user, chown
clears the set-user-id and set-group-id bits on a file to prevent accidental
or mischievous creation of set-user-id and set-group-id programs.
The chown
utility exits 0 on
success, and >0 if an error occurs.
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.
chflags(1), chgrp(1), find(1), chown(2), lchown(2), fts(3), symlink(7)
The chown
command is expected to be POSIX
1003.2 compliant.
The -v
and -d
options and the use of ``#'' to force a numeric lookup are extensions to
IEEE Std 1003.2 (“POSIX.2”).
A chown
utility appeared in
Version 1 AT&T UNIX.
May 19, 2023 | NetBSD 10.99 |