Members of the owning group other than the owner cannot change the file's owning group. The owning group of a file can be changed, by root, to any group. The owning group of a file can be changed by the file's owner, if the owner belongs to that group.The owner cannot transfer ownership, unless the owner is root, or uses sudo to run the command. Only root can change the owner of a file.

user and group can be specified by name or by number.This form does not cause an error, but changes nothing. Specifying a colon with no user or group is accepted, but ownership isn't changed. If group is omitted, but a colon follows user, the owner is changed to user, and the owning group is changed to the login group of user. In this form, user is omitted, and the group must be preceded by a colon. The user and group to own the file, separated by a colon, with no spaces between. In this form, the colon (' :') and the group is omitted. Specifically, there are five ways to format new-owner: new-owner form New ownership of file is specified by the argument new-owner, which takes this general form: ] chown -help chown -version Specifying the new owner When a file is created, its owner is the user who created it, and the owning group is the user's current group.Ĭhown can change these values to something else. These users are known as others, or the world. These apply to every other user on the system. These apply to a single group of users who can access the file. These permissions apply to a single user who has special access to the file. There are three major types of file permissions: These access rules are called permissions. Because of this, it needs to keep careful track of who is allowed to access a file, and how they can access it.

Succubus by Pete Chown