CHOWN(1)

📦
version 0.12.0 · 7 versions
, in ubuntu stonking

<h1>💜 NAME 💜</h1>

ok so bestie, welcome to the chown page — that's short for change owner, and it lives in the General Commands Manual, section 1 (the "type it in your terminal" section, iykyk). So without further ado, in the official words:

chown — Change file owner and group ✨

<h1>🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀</h1>

the vibe check, in code form:

chown [OPTION]... [OWNER][:[GROUP]] FILE...
chown [OPTION]... --reference=RFILE FILE...

two whole moods. you either say who owns it, or you point at a file and go "be like them" 🫶

<h1>🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸</h1>

Change file owner and group.

no literally, that's the whole thing. that's the job. it changes who owns a file and what group that file belongs to, and it is the main character of file permissions. periodt. 👑

heads up bestie: this is one of those commands where you'll probably be typing sudo first, because handing a file to someone else is a big-girl privilege move. 💅

<h1>✨ OPTIONS ✨</h1>

every single one, no skipping, we don't do that here:

  • --help — Print help information. your little "what do I do again?" button 🙈
  • -c, --changes — like verbose but report only when a change is made. so it'll be quiet if nothing actually happened, and speak up when it did 💬
  • --from <CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP> — change the owner and/or group of each file only if its current owner and/or group match those specified here. Either may be omitted, in which case a match is not required for the omitted attribute. it's giving conditional, lowkey. "only if it's currently this person's stuff" 🧚
  • --preserve-root — fail to operate recursively on /. it refuses to touch the root of your entire filesystem, which is the safest glow-up 🛡️
  • --no-preserve-root — do not treat / specially (the default). this is the default, bestie, so pay attention: / is not protected unless you protect it. 💀
  • --quiet — suppress most error messages. shhh. 🤫
  • -R, --recursive — operate on files and directories recursively. it goes down the whole tree, every folder, every file, no survivors 🌳
  • --reference <RFILE> — use RFILE's owner and group rather than specifying OWNER:GROUP values. copy the fit from another file instead of spelling it out 👯
  • -f, --silent — (real talk: this page lists it with no description attached, so I'm not gonna invent one for you 🙈)
  • -v, --verbose — output a diagnostic for every file processed. it narrates. every. single. file. 📢
  • -H — if a command line argument is a symbolic link to a directory, traverse it. follow it, but only when it's an argument you typed 🔗
  • -L — traverse every symbolic link to a directory encountered. follow ALL the links, no matter where they show up 🦋
  • -P — do not traverse any symbolic links (default). leave the links alone, this is the default energy ✋
  • --dereference — affect the referent of each symbolic link (this is the default), rather than the symbolic link itself. you're touching the thing it points at, not the link 🎯
  • -h, --no-dereference — affect symbolic links instead of any referenced file (useful only on systems that can change the ownership of a symlink). the link itself gets the treatment, not its friend 💫
  • -V, --version — Print version. flex the build number 💅

<h1>🌈 VERSION 🌈</h1>

v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0

that's the one, bestie. note it 💖

<h1>🍓 EXAMPLES 🍓</h1>

ok here's where it gets fun, copy-paste responsibly:

Change the owner user of a file/directory:

sudo chown user path/to/file_or_directory

Change the owner user and group of a file/directory:

sudo chown user:group path/to/file_or_directory

Change the owner user and group to both have the name user:

sudo chown user: path/to/file_or_directory

Change the group of a file to a group that the current user belongs to:

chown :group path/to/file_or_directory

Recursively change the owner of a directory and its contents:

sudo chown [-R|--recursive] user path/to/directory

Change the owner of a symbolic link:

sudo chown [-h|--no-dereference] user path/to/symlink

Change the owner of a file/directory to match a reference file:

sudo chown --reference path/to/reference_file path/to/file_or_directory

The examples are provided by the tldr-pages project <https://tldr.sh> under the CC BY 4.0 License. Please note that, as uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail.

fr fr, that last line matters: uutils is still cooking, so if an example doesn't behave, it's not you, it's the work-in-progress situation 😭

🌸 okay that's the whole page, ty for coming to my ted talk 🌸

this was CHOWN(1) from the General Commands Manual, stamped 2026-09-25, and it's the uutils coreutils build v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0 — go change some owners, bestie, you ate 💅✨🦋

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