Change File Ownership with chown

If you want to change the owner of a file or directory, you can use the chown command. The syntax is as follows:

chown DESIRED_OWNER PATH/TO/FILE

It is important to understand that as a regular user, you cannot change ownership of files or directories to have them belong to another user. However, the root account can. Consider the following example.

Let's suppose that you created a file called memo.txt in the user chris’s home directory while you were root user. Here’s how you, as root, could change it to be owned by chris:

chown chris /home/chris/memo.txt

This will change ownership of memo.txt to chris. However, this does not change the group owner, merely the user owner. If you wanted to change the group owner at the same time, you could have entered:

chown chris:chris /home/chris/memo.txt

Now, the file is also owned by the group joe.

When a new user is created, it is typical for a group to be created of the same name. This is because Linux requires users to be a member of at least one group, referred to as their primary group, as part of its security and access control model.

The chown command can also be employed recursively with the help of the -R option. This is particularly useful when you need to modify the ownership of an entire directory structure to be owned by a specific user. For instance, if you've connected a USB drive, mounted it on the /media/myusb directory, and wish to grant complete ownership of the drive's contents to the user chris, you can execute the following command:

chown -R chris:chris /media/myusb