Linux changing owner of directory

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I have a folder in my subdomain which is created through WHM so the owner of that subdomain is not the owner of main domain. I want to change the owner of one of the folders of subdomain to domain owner. I tried this, but when I check with winscp it shows owner as 500.

 chown users:user /home/xyz/somnething/photo/ 

I’ve tried to change from winscp also, but there is no option for winscp, so I’ve logged in as root using putty and ran the command from above, but it doesn’t help and I am unable to upload any file to subdomain from the main domain, as it returns error «permission denied».

$ ls -l /home/xyz/somnething/photo/ total 8 drwxr-xr-x 2 sujit sujit 4096 Feb 21 23:39 ./ drwxr-x--- 5 rohan nobody 4096 Feb 22 02:28 ../ 

I want to give the ownership of rohan to sujit to have rights to upload file from sujit domain to subdomain rohan Update: Now it is changing owner to 500

1 Answer 1

Use chown to change ownership and chmod to change rights.

use the -R option to apply the rights for all files inside of a directory too.

Note that both these commands just work for directories too. The -R option makes them also change the permissions for all files and directories inside of the directory.

sudo chown -R username:group directory 

will change ownership (both user and group) of all files and directories inside of directory and directory itself.

sudo chown username:group directory 

will only change the permission of the folder directory but will leave the files and folders inside the directory alone.

you need to use sudo to change the ownership from root to yourself.

Note that if you use chown user: file (Note the left-out group), it will use the default group for that user.

Also You can change the group ownership of a file or directory with the command:

chgrp group_name file/directory_name 

You must be a member of the group to which you are changing ownership to.

You can find group of file as follows

# ls -l file -rw-r--r-- 1 root family 0 2012-05-22 20:03 file # chown sujit:friends file 

User 500 is just a normal user. Typically user 500 was the first user on the system, recent changes (to /etc/login.defs) has altered the minimum user id to 1000 in many distributions, so typically 1000 is now the first (non root) user.

What you may be seeing is a system which has been upgraded from the old state to the new state and still has some processes knocking about on uid 500. You can likely change it by first checking if your distro should indeed now use 1000, and if so alter the login.defs file yourself, the renumber the user account in /etc/passwd and chown/chgrp all their files, usually in /home/, then reboot.

But in answer to your question, no, you should not really be worried about this in all likelihood. It’ll be showing as «500» instead of a username because o user in /etc/passwd has a uid set of 500, that’s all.

Also you can show your current numbers using id i’m willing to bet it comes back as 1000 for you.

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How to Use chown Command to Change Ownership in Linux

The chown command in Linux enables you to change the user and group ownership of a file or directory. Learn to use chown with some practical examples.

The chown command in Linux allows you to change the ownership of files and directories. You can rightly guess that ‘chown’ is short for ‘change owner’.

If you are not aware of these terms, I highly recommend reading my explainer article about file permissions and ownership in Linux.

Here’s a picture to quickly recall it:

With the chown command, you can change both user and group ownership of a file or a directory.

Examples of chown command in Linux

Here’s what the syntax for chown command looks like:

chown [options] user_spec files

Do keep in mind that chown is an administrative command and so you need to be root or have sudo rights in order to make changes with chown command. I hope you know how to add sudo user.

Otherwise, you’ll see an error like this:

chown: changing ownership of 'agatha.txt': Operation not permitted

Now let’s see how to use the chown command with examples.

Here’s the example set I am going to use:

-rw-r--r-- 1 abhishek abhishek 456 Jan 24 09:30 agatha.txt drwxr-xr-x 2 abhishek abhishek 4096 Jan 24 09:31 mydir drwxr-xr-x 3 abhishek abhishek 4096 Jan 24 09:30 new -rw-r--r-- 1 abhishek abhishek 356 Jan 24 09:30 sherlock.txt

1. Change or set the user ownership of a file

To change the ownership of a file, use the command in this fashion:

sudo chown user_name file_name

You may also use UID (user ID) instead of the user name. Here’s an example of the changes it makes:

[email protected]:~/tutorial$ sudo chown prakash agatha.txt [email protected]:~/tutorial$ ls -l agatha.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 prakash abhishek 456 Jan 24 09:30 agatha.txt

As you can see the owner of the file has changed to ‘prakash’ from ‘abhishek’ but the group remains ‘abhishek’. Let me show you how to change both user ownership and group ownership.

2. Change the user and group ownership

To change the user and group ownership of a file, you can specify the group with the user name separated by a column like this:

sudo chown user_name:group_name file_name

Of course, you can use UID and GID instead of user name and group name respectively.

[email protected]:~/tutorial$ sudo chown prakash:adm sherlock.txt [email protected]:~/tutorial$ ls -l sherlock.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 prakash adm 356 Jan 24 09:30 sherlock.txt

As you can see in the example above, I changed the user of the file sherlock.txt to ‘prakash’ and the group to ‘adm’.

3. Change the group to default group of a user

Every user has a default or primary group. If the user creates a new file or directory, this primary group automatically becomes the group owner of the file. You can list the default group of a user with the id command.

Now if you want to change the group ownership of a file to the default group of a user, you should just leave the group name after colon.

sudo chown user_name: file_name

As you can see in the example below, sherlock.text file user owner ‘prakash‘ and group owner ‘adm‘. I changed the owner to ‘abhishek’ but didn’t provide the group name. And yet it changed the group from ‘adm’ to default ‘abhishek’ group.

[email protected]:~/tutorial$ ls -l sherlock.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 prakash adm 356 Jan 24 09:30 sherlock.txt [email protected]:~/tutorial$ sudo chown abhishek: sherlock.txt [email protected]:~/tutorial$ id abhishek uid=1000(abhishek) gid=1000(abhishek) groups=1000(abhishek),4(adm),24(cdrom),27(sudo),30(dip),46(plugdev),116(lpadmin),126(sambashare),999(docker) [email protected]:~/tutorial$ ls -l sherlock.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 abhishek abhishek 356 Jan 24 09:30 sherlock.txt

4. Change the group only

If you just want to change the group without being bothered by the user owner, you can use the chown command like this:

sudo chown :group_name file_name

In the example below, I set the group ownership to sudo without touching the user ownership:

[email protected]:~/tutorial$ ls -l agatha.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 prakash abhishek 456 Jan 24 09:30 agatha.txt [email protected]:~/tutorial$ sudo chown :sudo agatha.txt [email protected]:~/tutorial$ ls -l agatha.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 prakash sudo 456 Jan 24 09:30 agatha.txt

5. Change user and group ownership of a directory recursively

In all the above commands, you can replace file with directory and it will work the same for changing ownership of the directory.

The one problem here is that by default the ownership of the content inside the directory is not changed.

sudo chown -R user_name:group_name directory_name

6. Set the same user and group ownership as a reference file

You can use a file as reference and change the user and group ownership of a file based on the reference file in this manner:

sudo chown --reference=file1.txt file2.txt

In the example below, file agatha.txt has been used as a reference. And as you can see, the ownership of sherlock.txt has been changed on the basis of agatha.txt.

[email protected]:~/tutorial$ ls -l agatha.txt sherlock.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 prakash sudo 456 Jan 24 09:30 agatha.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 abhishek abhishek 356 Jan 24 09:30 sherlock.txt [email protected]:~/tutorial$ sudo chown --reference=agatha.txt sherlock.txt [email protected]:~/tutorial$ ls -l agatha.txt sherlock.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 prakash sudo 456 Jan 24 09:30 agatha.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 prakash sudo 356 Jan 24 09:30 sherlock.txt

I think you have enough examples of the chown command to understand it. You can always refer to chown man page for more details.

If you have questions or suggestions, do let me know.

Источник

How do I change the owner of a directory in Linux?

All files and directories that exist on your Linux system have an owner, a group, and permission access rights that are granted to the file owners, its group members, or others. The chown command permits a Linux user to change any directory or file’s ownership. In this post, we will demonstrate the usage of the chown command for changing ownership through practical examples. But firstly, you should understand why you would want to change the ownership of any directory or file?

Here is the list of few scenarios in which you want to do this:

• For example, you want an already created directory or file to be accessible to a particular user.
• When a user leaves an organization, all of his data comes under the responsibility of another employee. Therefore, you want to change the ownership of the new team member.
• Changing directory or file ownership is also necessary when you are writing a script that has to be used by only a specific person.
• Transferring files between different Linux systems also requires changes in files and directories ownership.

Now let’s check out the syntax of the chown command.

chown command syntax

Utilize the “User” for the username or replace it using the user ID, also known as UID. Add the group name in the “Group” part of the GID (group ID). At the end of the chown command, add files or directories for which you want to change the ownership.

Changing the owner of a directory

We have created a separate user named “utest” and a group “ugroup” for demonstrating the examples. To change the ownership of any directory, utilize the chown command with the username and path of the directory.

Now, write out the “ls” command and check if your directory ownership is updated or not.

Changing the ownership of all sub-directories

Utilize the “-R” option of the chown command for changing the owners of all the files or folders present in a directory.

List out the directory content to view the results.

Changing the owner of a file

First of all, list out the file content to know about its ownership.

After that, specify the name of the user who you want to be the new owner of this file. In our case, we have chosen “utest” to avail the ownership of “samplefile.txt.”

Again, verify the updated ownership changes.

You can also use the “User ID” or “UID” of any user for this purpose. For that, retrieve the user ID of the new user by utilizing the “id” command with the “-u” option.

Add the User ID instead of the username to make the ownership changes.

Changing the owners of multiple files

Specify the file names at the end of the chown command to change the ownership of multiple files at once.

Write out the below-given command to confirm the changes.

Changing the owner of directory and file at once

Follow the below-given method for changing the owners of the file and directory instantly.

This command will make “utest” the new owner of the “test directory” and the “samplefile.txt.”

Changing the owner using wildcards

Wildcards are used to select a specific file group according to the given pattern. The chown command will then change the owner of the files after retrieving them from the wildcard execution.

Conclusion

For data security concerns, you may want to specify the ownership of files and directories. In Linux, we use the chown command-line utility for changing the ownership of directories or files. You can also utilize this command for changing directories and multiple file ownership at once. In this post, all of these statements are justified by providing practical examples.

About the author

Talha Saif Malik

Talha is a contributor at Linux Hint with a vision to bring value and do useful things for the world. He loves to read, write and speak about Linux, Data, Computers and Technology.

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