Change file owner and/or group.
Syntax
chown [-fhv] [-R [-H | -L | -P]] owner[:group] file ...
chown [-fhv] [-R [-H | -L | -P]] :group file ...
Options
-R Recurse: Change the mode of file hierarchies rooted in the files
instead of just the files themselves.
Take care to not run recursive chown on the root '/' directory or any other system directory.
-R -H Follow symbolic links on the command line
(by default Symbolic links within the tree are not followed.)
-R -L All symbolic links are followed.
-R -P No symbolic links are followed. (default)
-f Do not display a diagnostic message if chmod could not modify the
mode for file.
-h If the file is a symbolic link, change the mode of the link
itself rather than the file that the link points to.
-v Verbose, show filenames as the mode is modified*
The owner and group operands are both optional; however, at least one
must be specified.
If the group operand is specified, it must be preceded by a colon (:)
* The -v option is non-standard and its use in scripts is not recommended.
The ownership of a file can only be altered by a super-user for obvious security reasons.
Previous versions of the chown utility used the dot (.) character to distinguish the group name. This has been changed to be a colon (:) character so that user and group names can contain the dot character.
The -v option is non-standard and its use in scripts is not recommended.
The owner/group can be either a numeric ID or a name. If a user/group name is also a numeric user ID, the operand is used as a user name.
chown exits 0 on success, and > 0 if an error occurs.
Many of the utilities supplied with macOS are very old versions that haven’t been updated for licensing reasons. You can update chown to the latest GNU version using brew, formulae: [x]
$ brew install coreutils
Assign Ursula as the owner of "MyFile.txt" file in the Shared directory.
$ sudo chown Ursula /Users/Shared/MyFile.txt
Assign Ursula as the owner, and staff as the group for everything in the "tmp" folder
$ sudo chown -R Ursula:staff /Users/Shared/tmp/
Change the owner of only the hidden files (prefixed with .) in the folder Work:
chown -R .* goes up as well as down
So,
sudo chown -R audrey /Work/.*
Will be expanded by the shell to:
sudo chown -R audrey /Work/. /Work/.. /Work/.bash_historyIn other words chown -R audrey /Work/.. is equivalent to chown -R audrey /
Which we do not want!
The correct way to set this:
sudo chown -R audrey /Work/.[^.]*
Reset the permissions on the entire home folder for the currently logged in user ($USER) this will reset the user ID number (UID) for all files. POSIX file permissions only use the UID, not the UserName or GUID.
$ sudo chown -R $USER ~$USER
“To me, constructive criticism is when people take ownership of their ideas. That's why I don't listen to anything that's anonymous. But it's hard; when there's something hurtful out there, I still want to read it over and over and memorize it and explain my point of view to the person” ~ Brene Brown
Local man page: chown - Command line help page on your local machine.
chflags - Change a file or folder’s flags.
chgrp - Change group ownership.
chmod - Change access permissions.
umask - Users file creation mask.
