The chown utility

chown is a utility for changing the owner and/or group of specified files. If only a username is provided, that user becomes the owner and the group remains unchanged. If a group is specified after a colon, both the owner and the group are updated.

Viewing owner and group

To view file and directory details:

ls -l

For a specific file:

ls -l file.php

ls -l output in the WordPress root directory

The owner and group are shown in the 3rd and 4th columns of the output.

Syntax

chown [-cfhvR] [--dereference] [--reference=rfile] user[:group] file…

Key options:

• -c, --changes — report only files whose ownership actually changed.
• -f, --silent, --quiet — suppress error messages for files whose ownership cannot be changed.
• -h, --no-dereference — affect symbolic links themselves rather than the files they point to.
• -R, --recursive — recursively change ownership of directories and their contents.
• -v, --verbose — describe the action taken for each file.
• --dereference — change the owner of the file a symbolic link points to, not the link itself.
• --reference=rfile — set the owner to match that of rfile.

Example

To recursively change the owner and group of a website directory at /var/www/example.com:

cd /var/www
chown -Rv example:example example.com

The first command navigates to the target directory, the second recursively updates the owner and group for the directory and all its contents.