Changing File Ownership

This section describes how to change the ownership of a file.

How to Change the Owner of a File

1. Become superuser.

   By default, the owner cannot use the chown command to change the owner of a file or directory. However, you can enable the owner to use chown by adding the following line to the system's /etc/system file and rebooting the system.

   set rstchown = 0

   See chown(1) for more details. Also, be aware that there can be other restrictions on changing ownership on NFS-mounted file systems.

2. Change the owner of a file by using the chown command.

   # chown newowner filename

   newowner	Specifies the user name or UID of the new owner of the file or directory.
   filename	Specifies the file or directory.

3. Verify the owner of the file is changed.

   # ls -l filename

Example--Changing the Owner of a File

The following example sets the ownership on myfile to the user rimmer.

# chown rimmer myfile
# ls -l myfile
-rw-r--r--   1 rimmer   scifi   112640 May 24 10:49 myfile

How to Change Group Ownership of a File

1. Become superuser.

   By default, the owner can only use the chgrp command to change the group of a file to a group in which the owner belongs. For example, if the owner of a file only belongs to the staff and sysadm groups, the owner can only change the group of a file to staff or sysadm group.

   However, you can enable the owner to change the group of a file to a group in which the owner doesn't belong by adding the following line to the system's /etc/system file and rebooting the system.

   set rstchown = 0

   See chgrp(1) for more details. Also, be aware that there can be other restrictions on changing groups on NFS-mounted file systems.

2. Change the group owner of a file by using the chgrp command.

   $ chgrp group filename

   group	Specifies the group name or GID of the new group of the file or directory.
   filename	Specifies the file or directory.

   See "Setting Up and Maintaining User Accounts and Groups (Tasks)" in System Administration Guide, Volume 1 for information on setting up groups.

3. Verify the group owner of the file is changed.

   $ ls -l filename

Example--Changing Group Ownership of a File

The following example sets the group ownership on myfile to the group scifi.

$ chgrp scifi myfile
$ ls -l myfile
-rwxrw-- 1 rimmer scifi 12985 Nov 12 16:28 myfile