Change ownership chown

Change ownership chown

As I already mentioned earlier, the owner is the file's creator; therefore, the file is owned by a user and the user is owned by a group. This basically means the file is also owned by the group. A regular user is not able to take ownership of a file created by a different user, but the administrator (root) can and there after can reassign permissions.

This is much simpler; all you have to do is be root

[root@server2 collections]# chown user1 afile
[root@server2 collections]#ls –l
total

rw-r--r--	1 user1	root	6 Aug 17	09:09 afile
-rw-r--r--	1 root	root	27 Aug 17	09:46 file2
-rw-r-- r--	1 root	root	14 Aug 17	09:46 myfile
drwxr-xr-x	2 root	root	4096 Aug 17	10:34 another/

[root@server2 collections]#

As you can see the new owner now is user1, even though user1 belongs to group root.

How can you change the group?

Look at the following example

I will add user1 to group user1:

root@server2 collections]#chown user1.user1 afile

Now I will do the ls –l

[root@server2 collections]#ls –l total

rw-r--r--	1 user1	user1	6 Aug 17	09:09 afile
-rw-r--r--	1 root	root	27 Aug 17	09:46 file2
-rw-r-- r--	1 root	root	14 Aug 17	09:46 myfile
drwxr-xr-x	2 root	root	4096 Aug 17	10:34 another/

[root@server2 collections]#

Now afile belongs to User1, User1 can now do anything to the file.

Note: An owner can be from any group, and still can have full control of the specified file if proper permission is granted.