chown

Change the owner and group of a file or folder

What it does

chown hands a file to another user: who first, then what. user:group changes both the owner and the group at once, :group only the group. Only root can change owners, so the command runs with sudo.

A typical case is site files uploaded as your own user: the web server on Ubuntu runs as www-data and cannot write to them until you make it the owner. -R changes a folder and everything inside.

Careful. sudo chown -R with a wrong path can change the owner of system files, and the server stops working properly. Check the path before you run it.

Syntax

sudo chown <user>:<group> <file>
sudo chown -R <user>:<group> <folder>

Examples

• Make www-data the owner and group of /var/www/shop and everything inside

  sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/shop

  same as: sudo chown --recursive www-data:www-data /var/www/shop

  • chown — change the owner
  • -R — recursively
  • www-data:www-data — user:group
  • /var/www/shop — the site folder

Related commands

• chmod — Change who may read, write or run a file
• usermod — Change a user, for example add them to a group
• sudo — Run a command with admin rights

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