Change file ownership

The chown (stands for change owner) command is used to change the ownership of a file in Linux. In its most basic form, you just provide the name of the new owner and the filename:

chown NEW_OWNER FILENAME

For example, here is the command that will change the owner of the file called bobs_file.txt to jwilliams:

You can also change both the file owner and the group of the file using the chown command. The syntax looks like this:

chown NEW_OWNER:NEW_GROUP FILENAME

Let’s change the owner and the group of the bobs_file.txt:

To change only the group of the file, you can omit the NEW_OWNER parameter: