Table of Contents
Basic syntax and usage
Modify the ownership of directories and sub-contents (recursive operation)
Change users only or regroup only
Accurately modify specific files with find

How to change file ownership chown

Jul 31, 2025 am 04:05 AM

To modify file ownership using chown, you need to pay attention to syntax and permissions. The basic format is sudo chown [Options] User file/directory, such as sudo chown user1 example.txt or sudo chown user1:group1 example.txt; to modify directory and subcontent, you need to add -R parameters, such as sudo chown -R user1:group1 myfolder/; Common problems include forgetting to add -R, wrong operating system directory, and wrong colon position when modifying only users or groups; to cooperate with find to accurately modify specific files, such as find /path/to/dir -type f -name "*.log" -exec sudo chown user1:group1 {} \;.

How to change file ownership chown

chown is actually quite straightforward to change the ownership of a file, but you have to pay attention to several key points. The simplest case is that you change the owner of a file or directory, such as changing a file to user A to user B. However, in actual operations, there may also be details such as user groups and permission recursion.


Basic syntax and usage

The basic format of chown is:

 sudo chown [Options] [User][:Group] File/Directory

For example, if you want to change the owner of a file called example.txt to user1, you can write:

 sudo chown user1 example.txt

If you want to change the owner and the group at the same time, you can:

 sudo chown user1:group1 example.txt

It should be noted that ordinary users usually do not have permission to change the ownership of files at will, so they need to use sudo most of the time.


Modify the ownership of directories and sub-contents (recursive operation)

If you want to modify the ownership of the entire directory and all files and subdirectories in it, you need to add the -R parameter:

 sudo chown -R user1:group1 myfolder/

This command will turn all contents in myfolder into user1 users and group1 groups. This is very common when migrating websites, backup recovery, or replacement maintenance.

FAQ:

  • Forgot to add -R , but only the directory itself was changed and it did not take effect.
  • Misoperation changed the ownership of the system directory, resulting in service abnormality

Change users only or regroup only

Sometimes you just want to change the owner or group one of them, you can do it separately:

  • Change the user only:
 sudo chown user1 file.txt
  • Reorganized only:
 sudo chown :group1 file.txt

Pay attention to the position of the colon. If written as user1: it means that only the user is changed, not reorganized; :group1 is changed only.


Accurately modify specific files with find

Sometimes you don't want to change the entire directory, but you just want to change certain types of files or files that meet certain conditions. At this time, you can use find to match chown .

For example, just change the ownership of all .log files in a certain directory:

 find /path/to/dir -type f -name "*.log" -exec sudo chown user1:group1 {} \;

This combination is very practical when processing a large number of files and can also avoid misoperation of files that should not be moved.


Basically that's it. If you master these usages, daily operation and maintenance or permission management is enough. Remember that the most important thing is that permission issues are prone to errors, especially when modifying system files, do not add -R randomly, see the path clearly before executing.

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