The chown command is used on Unix-like systems to change the owner of a file. In most implementations, it can only be executed by the Superuser. Privilege (Computing) (regular) users who wish to change the group of a file that they own may use chgrp.

=Usage=

The general syntax for the chown command is:

chown [ user ][: group ] target1 [ target2 ..]

*The optional user parameter indicates the new user who should take ownership of the targets. *The optional group parameter (which must be prefixed with a colon, :) indicates the group with which the targets should be associated. *The target parameters indicate the files or directories for which the user and/or group will be changed.

==Footnotes==

*One of either user or group must be specified. The chown command will not execute properly without at least one of those parameters. *The user and group parameters can be either symbolic names or identifiers (i.e. a User identifier (Unix) or Group identifier (Unix)).

=Usage examples=

# chown root /var/run/httpd.pid

*Change the owner of /var/run/httpd.pid to root (the standard name for the Superuser).

# chown nobody:nobody /tmp /var/tmp

*Change the owner of /tmp and /var/tmp to nobody (the standard name for Nobody). *Changes the group associated with the same targets to nobody (the standard group corresponding to Nobody).

# chown :512 /home

*Change the group identifier of /home to 512 (regardless of whether a group name is associated with the identifier 512 or not).

=See also=

*Chmod *Chgrp *User identifier (Unix) *Group identifier (Unix)

=External links=