This manual page
documents the GNU version of
chown.
chown
changes the user and/or group ownership of each given file. If
only an owner (a user name or numeric user ID) is given, that user is made the
owner of each given file, and the files' group is not changed. If the
owner is followed by a colon and a group name (or numeric group ID),
with no spaces between them, the group ownership of the files is
changed as well. If a colon but no group name follows the user name,
that user is made the owner of the files and the group of the files is
changed to that user's login group. If the colon and group are given,
but the owner is omitted, only the group of the files is changed;
in this case,
chown
performs the same function as
chgrp.
If only a colon is given, or if the entire operand is empty, neither the
owner nor the group is changed.
OPTIONS
Change the owner and/or group of each FILE to OWNER and/or GROUP.
With --reference, change the owner and group of each FILE to those of RFILE.
-c, --changes
like verbose but report only when a change is made
--dereference
affect the referent of each symbolic link, rather
than the symbolic link itself (this is the default)
-h, --no-dereference
affect each symbolic link instead of any referenced
file (useful only on systems that can change the
ownership of a symlink)
--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.
--no-preserve-root do not treat `/' specially (the default)
--preserve-root
fail to operate recursively on `/'
-f, --silent, --quiet
suppress most error messages
--reference=RFILE
use RFILE's owner and group rather than
the specifying OWNER:GROUP values
-R, --recursive
operate on files and directories recursively
-v, --verbose
output a diagnostic for every file processed
The following options modify how a hierarchy is traversed when the -R
option is also specified. If more than one is specified, only the final
one takes effect.
-H
if a command line argument is a symbolic link
to a directory, traverse it
-L
traverse every symbolic link to a directory
encountered
-P
do not traverse any symbolic links (default)
--help
display this help and exit
--version
output version information and exit
Owner is unchanged if missing. Group is unchanged if missing, but changed
to login group if implied by a `:' following a symbolic OWNER.
OWNER and GROUP may be numeric as well as symbolic.
