man pages section 1: User Commands

chown(1)

NAME

chown- Change file ownership

SYNOPSIS

chown

-fhRM

owner

group

file

DESCRIPTION

The chown utility will set the user ID of the file named by each file to the user ID specified by owner, and, optionally, will set the group ID to that specified by group.

If chown is invoked without the file_setid privilege to change the ownership of a file, the set-user-ID bit is cleared.

Only the owner of a file (or a user invoking the command with the file_chown privilege) may change the owner of that file.

The operating system has a configuration option, _POSIX_CHOWN_RESTRICTED, to restrict ownership changes. When this option is in effect, the owner of the file is prevented from changing the owner ID of the file. The command requires the file_chown privilege to arbitrarily change owner IDs, whether or not this option is in effect.

OPTIONS

The following options are supported:

-f: Do not report errors.
-h: If the file is a symbolic link, change the owner of the symbolic link. Without this option, the owner of the file referenced by the symbolic link is changed.
-R: Recursive. chown descends through the directory, and any subdirectories, setting the ownership ID as it proceeds. When a symbolic link is encountered, the owner of the target file is changed (unless the -h option is specified), but no recursion takes place.
-M: chown processes all accessible single-level directories as it descends multilevel directories.

OPERANDS

The following operands are supported:

owner[:group]: A user ID and optional group ID to be assigned to file. The owner portion of this operand must be a user name from the user database or a numeric user ID. Either specifies a user ID to be given to each file named by file. If a numeric owner exists in the user database as a user name, the user ID number associated with that user name will be used as the user ID. Similarly, if the group portion of this operand is present, it must be a group name from the group database or a numeric group ID. Either specifies a group ID to be given to each file. If a numeric group operand exists in the group database as a group name, the group ID number associated with that group name will be used as the group ID.
file: A pathname of a file whose user ID is to be modified.

USAGE

See largefile(5) for the description of the behavior of chown when encountering files greater than or equal to 2 Gbyte ( 2³¹ bytes).

EXAMPLES

Example 1 Changing ownership of all files in the hierarchy

To change ownership of all files in the hierarchy, including symbolic links, but not the targets of the links:

example% chown -R -h owner[:group] file...

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of chown: LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, and NLSPATH.

EXIT STATUS

The following exit values are returned:

0: The utility executed successfully and all requested changes were made.
>0: An error occurred.

SUMMARY OF TRUSTED SOLARIS CHANGES

The -M option processes all accessible single-level directories in multilevel directories. If chown is invoked without the file_setid privilege to change the ownership of a file, chown clears the file's set-user-ID bit. To arbitrarily change owner IDs, chown requires the file_chown privilege.

FILES

/etc/passwd: System password file

ATTRIBUTES

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

ATTRIBUTE TYPE	ATTRIBUTE VALUE
Availability	SUNWcsu
CSI	Enabled (see `NOTES`)

Trusted Solaris 8 Reference Manual

chgrp(1), chmod(1), chown(2), fpathconf(2)

SunOS 5.8 Reference Manual

passwd(4), system(4), attributes(5), environ(5), largefile(5)

NOTES

chown is CSI-enabled except for the owner and group names.

Trusted Solaris 8 Last Revised 1 Jun 1998