MAN page from Mandriva 2010 coreutils-doc-7.5-2.1mdv2010.0.i586.rpm

CHOWN

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: August 2009
Index

NAME

chown - change file owner and group

SYNOPSIS

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

DESCRIPTION

This manual pagedocuments the GNU version ofchown.chownchanges the user and/or group ownership of each given file. Ifonly an owner (a user name or numeric user ID) is given, that user is made theowner of each given file, and the files' group is not changed. If theowner is followed by a colon and a group name (or numeric group ID),with no spaces between them, the group ownership of the files ischanged 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 ischanged 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,chownperforms the same function aschgrp.If only a colon is given, or if the entire operand is empty, neither theowner 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 (this isthe default), rather than the symbolic link itself
-h, --no-dereference: affect each symbolic link instead of any referencedfile (useful only on systems that can change theownership of a symlink)
--from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP: change the owner and/or group of each file only ifits current owner and/or group match those specifiedhere. Either may be omitted, in which case a matchis 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 thanspecifying 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 -Roption is also specified. If more than one is specified, only the finalone takes effect.

-H: if a command line argument is a symbolic linkto a directory, traverse it
-L: traverse every symbolic link to a directoryencountered
-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 changedto login group if implied by a `:' following a symbolic OWNER.OWNER and GROUP may be numeric as well as symbolic.

EXAMPLES

chown root /u: Change the owner of /u to "root".
chown root:staff /u: Likewise, but also change its group to "staff".
chown -hR root /u: Change the owner of /u and subfiles to "root".

AUTHOR

Written by David MacKenzie and Jim Meyering.

REPORTING BUGS

Report chown bugs to bug-coreutilsAATTgnu.org
GNU coreutils home page: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
General help using GNU software: <http://www.gnu.org/gethelp/>

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

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