chown

chown
	The chown command
Original author(s)	Ken Thompson,; Dennis Ritchie
Developer(s)	AT&T Bell Laboratories
Initial release	November 3, 1971; 50 years ago
Operating system	Unix and Unix-like, IBM i
Platform	Cross-platform
Type	Command

The command chown /ˈtʃoʊn/, an abbreviation of change owner, is used on Unix and Unix-like operating systems to change the owner of file system files, directories. Unprivileged (regular) users who wish to change the group membership of a file that they own may use chgrp.

The ownership of any file in the system may only be altered by a super-user. A user cannot give away ownership of a file, even when the user owns it. Similarly, only a member of a group can change a file's group ID to that group.^[1]

The chown command has also been ported to the IBM i operating system.^[2]

Syntax[]

chown name_of_new_owner file_name

chown newuser:newgroup file_name

References[]

^ BSD Man page for chown, March 31, 1994
^ IBM. "IBM System i Version 7.2 Programming Qshell" (PDF). Retrieved 2020-09-05.

External links[]

chown – Commands & Utilities Reference, The Single UNIX Specification, Issue 7 from The Open Group
chown manual page
The chown Command by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)

[1] BSD Man page for chown, March 31, 1994

[2] IBM. "IBM System i Version 7.2 Programming Qshell" (PDF). Retrieved 2020-09-05.

[1]

[2]

v t Unix command-line interface programs and shell builtins
File system	cat chmod chown chgrp cksum cmp cp dd du df file fuser ln ls mkdir mv pax pwd rm rmdir split tee touch type umask
Processes	at bg crontab fg kill nice ps time
User environment	env exit logname mesg talk tput uname who write
Text processing	awk basename comm csplit cut diff dirname ed ex fold head iconv join m4 more nl paste patch printf sed sort strings tail tr uniq vi wc xargs
Shell builtins	alias cd echo test unset wait
Searching	find grep
Documentation	man
Software development	ar ctags lex make nm strip yacc
Miscellaneous	bc cal expr lp od sleep true and false
Categories Standard Unix programs Unix SUS2008 utilities List

v t GNU Core Utilities command-line interface programs
File system	chmod chown chgrp cksum cp dd df dir install ln ls mkdir mkfifo mknod mktemp mv rm rmdir shred sync touch truncate vdir
Text utilities	base32 base64 cat cksum comm csplit cut expand fmt fold head join md5sum nl od paste ptx pr sha1sum shuf sort split sum tac tail tr tsort unexpand uniq wc
Shell utilities	arch basename chroot date dirname du echo env expr factor false groups id link logname nice nohup printenv printf pwd seq sleep stat tee test timeout true tty uname unlink uptime users who whoami yes

chown

Contents

Syntax[]

See also[]

References[]

External links[]

The `chown` command
Original author(s)	Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie
Developer(s)	AT&T Bell Laboratories
Initial release	November 3, 1971; 50 years ago (1971-11-03)
Operating system	Unix and Unix-like, IBM i
Platform	Cross-platform
Type	Command