chown Command - Change File Owner and Group

chown changes the owner and/or group of files and directories. It is commonly used to manage file permissions and ownership in multi-user environments.

Syntax

chown [options] owner[:group] file...

Examples

chown user file.txt

chown user:group file.txt

Notes

• Requires root privileges to change ownership to another user.
• Use -R to change ownership recursively for directories.
• Ownership changes do not affect file contents.