💾 Using chown to change ownership
September 28, 2019
File ownership is fundamental in Linux. Every file is associated with an owner and a group, which is something we can change using the chown command.
File permissions govern who can read, write to, and delete file on a computer.
In this article, we will see how to use the Linux 🐧 chown to control file permissions. 🤩
📌 Prerequisites
A basic familiarity with Linux and the command line would help, but is not required.
Let’s start 🤩
To understand how chown works, you just have to follow the instructions below.
First, we need to open our Linux terminal :battery:, I’m using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) with Ubuntu config you can use any terminal config of your choice. 😎
For now our directory is empty, let’s create something to work on with. You can use mkdir to create a directory and touch to create a file.
mkdir dir1touch dir1/file2.txt
Now, let’s take a look at the directory using the find command:
find .
Just a single directory and a file in it. Now let’s get started learning about chown! 🤑
First, let’s create a file named file1.txt in the current directory.
touch file1.txt
Now, create a user named myuser1 and check the ownership of file1.txt using ls -l, use sudo for administrative privileges and enter your password.
sudo useradd myuser1
We can see that the current owner of the file is majhi_rockzz and it belongs to the majhi_rockzz group. (the owner and group name can be different in different machine eg. root, sumit_lappy, sagar_pc etc.
Let’s change the ownership of file1.txt to myuser1:
sudo chown myuser1 file1.txt
Using ls -l, you can see that the owner of file1.txt has changed to myuser1.
If we want to change the group of a file, we can do that also using chown:
sudo chown :myuser1 file1.txt
We can also change both the owner and group of a file in single command as shown here:
⭐
sudo chown myuser1:myuser1 newfile1.txt
🐠 If we wish to recursively change ownership of a directory and its content, we can do it by passing the -R(recursive) flag to chown. Let’s do that now with:
sudo chown -R myuser1:myuser1 dir1
chown can also be used to copy the owner/group permissions from one file to another:
sudo chown file1.txt --reference=/tmp/rootfile1.txt
If you ls -l the current directory, you’ll see that file1.txt now belongs to majhi_rockzz again.
Finally, if you wish to list the changes made by the chown command in a verbose manner, we can do so using this command:
sudo chown -v user1:user1 file1.txt
Wrapping Up
In this article we learned about how the chown command can be used to control the ownership of a file or files. TaTa 👋
