chown(1)                                                              chown(1)


NAME
     chown, chgrp - change owner or group

SYNOPSIS
     chown [ -Rfh ] owner[{.|:}group] file ...

     chgrp [ -Rfh ] group file ...

DESCRIPTION
     chown changes the owner of the files to owner.  The owner may be either a
     login name found in the password file, or a decimal user ID.  An optional
     group, separated from the owner by either a period or a colon, may also
     be specified.  The group may be either a group name found in the group
     file, or a decimal group ID.

     chgrp changes the group ID of the files to group.  The group may be
     either a group name found in the group file, or a decimal group ID.

     No errors, except for usage errors, are reported when the -f (force)
     option is given.

     When the -R option is given, the command recursively descends its
     directory arguments setting the specified owner or group.  When symbolic
     links are encountered and the -h option is not given, they are traversed
     and the owner/group of the file referenced by the symbolic link is
     changed.

     When the -h option is given and the file is a symbolic link, change the
     owner/group of the symbolic link.  Without this option, the owner/group
     of the file referenced by the symbolic link is changed.

     If either command is invoked by other than the superuser, the set-user-ID
     and set-group-ID bits of the file mode, 04000 and 02000 respectively,
     will be cleared.

     Only the owner of a file (or the superuser) may change the owner or group
     of that file.

     However, if the variable restricted_chown is enabled (see intro(2) and
     systune(1M)) then only the superuser can change the owner of the file,
     because if users were able to give files away, they could defeat the file
     space accounting procedures.  The owner of the file may change the group
     ownership only to those groups of which he is a member.

FILES
     /etc/passwd
     /etc/group

NOTES
     Because chown uses a depth-first algorithm to recursively descend its
     directory arguments, there is a limitation to how deep it can descend
     which is dependent on the number of file descriptors available to a given


     shell.  find(1) can be used if one needs to descend deeper than a given
     configuration will allow.

SEE ALSO
     chmod(1), find(1), chown(2), group(4), passwd(4), stat(4).

DIAGNOSTICS
     chown and chgrp will exit with a status of 0 if all file operations
     completed successfully.  If there are any failures, the exit status will
     be > 0.


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