NAME

chown - change file owner and group

SYNOPSIS /sɪˈnɑpsɪs/

chown [OPTION] ...[OWNER]

DESCRIPTION

This manual page documents the GNU version of chown. chown changes the user and/or group ownership of each given file. If only an owner(a user name or numeric user ID) is given,that user is made the owner of each given file,and the files' group is not changed. If the owner is followed by a colon and a group name (or numeric group ID),
with no spaces between them,the group ownership of the files is changed as well. If a colon but no group name follows the user name,
that user is made the owner of files and the group of files is changed
to that user's login group.If the colon and group are given,but the
owner is omitted,only the group of the files is changed;
in this case,chown performs the same function as chgrp.
If only a colon is given,or if the entire operand is empty,neither
the owner nor the group is changed.

OPTIONS

Change the owner and/or group of each FILE to OWNER and/or
GROUP. With -- reference,change the owner and group
of each FILE to those of RFILE.

• -c, --changes
  like verbose but report only when change is made
• -f,-- silent,--quiet
  suppress most error messages
• -v,--verbose
  output a diagnostic for every file processed
• -- dereference
  affect the referent of each symbolic link(this is the default),
  rather than the symbolic link itself
• -h,--no-dereference
  affect symbolic links instead of any referenced file(useful
  only on systems that can change the ownership of a symlink)
• -- from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP
  change the owner and/or group of each file only if its current
  owner and/or group match those specified here. Either may
  be omitted,in which case a match is not required for the omitted
  attribute
• --no-preserve-root
  do not treat '/' specially(the default)
• --preseve--root
  fail to operate recursively on "/"
• --reference=RFILE
  use RFILE's owner and group rather than specifying OWNER:GROUP values
• -R, --recursive
  operate on files and directories recursively
  The following options modify how hierarchy is traversed when
  the -R option is also specified. If more than one is specified,only
  the final one takes effect.
• -H
  if a command line argument is a symbolic to a directory,traverse it
• -L
  traverse every symbolic line to a directory encountered
• -P
  do not traverse any symbolic lines(default)
• --help
  display this help and exit
• --version
  output version information and exit
  Owner is unchanged if missing.Group is unchanged if missing.
  but changed to login group if implied by a ":" following a symbolic
  OWNER. OWNER and GROUP may be numeric as well as symbolic.

EXAMPLES

• chown root /u
  Change the owner of /u to "root"
• chown root:staff /u
  likewise,but also change its group to "staff"
• chown -hR root /u
  change the owner of /u and subfiles to "root".;