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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Change ownership of a directory Post 302773875 by Smiling Dragon on Friday 1st of March 2013 12:38:22 AM
Old 03-01-2013
Sorry but on most types of UNIX, you need to be the root user to do that. It's a security feature (directories included).

Imagine a shared environment in, say, a university. You don't like "bob" very much so you create a bunch of dodgy files containing unsavory pictures, bomb recipies and other antisocial things and drop it into /tmp. You then chown to the files to bob and then send an email the head of department Smilie

If it's something you need to routinely do though and it's on the same name files every time, talk to your administrator about being given special rights to run the following command:
sudo chown id1 /mypath/bin
 

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chown(1)						      General Commands Manual							  chown(1)

NAME
chown - Changes the owner of files or directories SYNOPSIS
chown [-fhR] owner [:group] file... The chown command changes the owner of the specified files or directories to the specified user name or user ID. STANDARDS
Interfaces documented on this reference page conform to industry standards as follows: chown: XCU5.0 Refer to the standards(5) reference page for more information about industry standards and associated tags. OPTIONS
[Tru64 UNIX] Turns off error reporting. [Tru64 UNIX] If file is a symbolic link, chown -h file changes the owner of the symbolic link. The chown file format changes the owner of the file referenced by the symbolic link. Descends recursively through its directory arguments, setting the specified owner. OPERANDS
The pathname of the file for which ownership is to be changed. A user ID and optional group ID to be assigned to file. The owner portion of this operand must be a user name from the user database or a numeric user ID. Either specifies a user ID to be given to each file named by one of the file operands. If a numeric owner operand exists in the user database as a user name, the user ID number associated with that user name will be used as the user ID. If the group portion of this operand is present, it must be a group name from the group database or a numeric group ID. Either spec- ifies a group ID to be given to each file. If a numeric group operand exists in the group database as a group name, the group ID number associated with that group name will be used as the group ID. DESCRIPTION
[Tru64 UNIX] Only a user with superuser authority can use the chown command. The owner argument must be a valid user name or a valid numerical user ID. The optional group argument must be a valid group name or a valid numerical group ID. EXIT STATUS
The following exit values are returned: The chown command executed successfully and all requested changes have been made. An error occurred. EXAMPLES
To change the owner of the file program.c, enter: chown steffan program.c The user access permissions for program.c now apply to steffan. As the owner, steffan can use the chmod command to permit or deny the other users access to program.c. See the chmod command for details. ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
The following environment variables affect the execution of chown: Provides a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. If LANG is unset or null, the corresponding value from the default locale is used. If any of the internationalization vari- ables contain an invalid setting, the utility behaves as if none of the variables had been defined. If set to a non-empty string value, overrides the values of all the other internationalization variables. Determines the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single-byte as opposed to multibyte characters in arguments). Determines the locale for the for- mat and contents of diagnostic messages written to standard error. Determines the location of message catalogues for the processing of LC_MESSAGES. FILES
Contains user names and numeric user IDs. SEE ALSO
Commands: chgrp(1), chmod(1), passwd(1) Functions: chown(2), chmod(2) Files: passwd(4) Standards: standards(5) chown(1)
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