chown

- change owner

Synopsis

/usr/ucb/chown [-fR] owner[.group] filename...

Description

chown changes the owner of the filenames to owner. The owner can be either a decimal user ID (UID) or a login name found in the password file. An optional group can also be specified. The group can be either a decimal group ID (GID) or a group name found in the GID file.

In the default case, only the super-user of the machine where the file is physically located can change the owner. The system configuration option {_POSIX_CHOWN_RESTRICTED} and the privileges PRIV_FILE_CHOWN and PRIV_FILE_CHOWN_SELF also affect who can change the ownership of a file. See chown(2) and privileges(5).

Options

The following options are supported:

-f

Do not report errors.

-R

Recursively descend into directories setting the ownership of all files in each directory encountered. When symbolic links are encountered, their ownership is changed, but they are not traversed.

Usage

See largefile(5) for the description of the behavior of chown when encountering files greater than or equal to 2 Gbyte ( 2³¹ bytes).

Files

/etc/passwd

Password file

Attributes

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

See Also

chgrp(1), chown(2), group(4), passwd(4), attributes(5), largefile(5), privileges(5)