How do you change file ownership with chown?

chown owner:group file sets who owns a file; only root may hand a file to a different owner, while a regular user can at most change the group (and only to a group they belong to).

The root-only restriction exists to stop "quota dumping" and privilege tricks: if any user could give their files away, they could dodge disk quotas or plant a file under someone else's name. Group ownership is looser because you can only assign groups you're already in. Remember a freshly created file's owner is you and its group is your primary group — chown is how you change that afterward. Note chown follows symlinks by default; use -h to retarget the link itself.

chown owner file               # Change owner only
chown owner:group file         # Change owner and group
chown :group file              # Change group only
chown -R owner:group dir/      # Recursive

Examples:

chown labstudent file.txt
chown labstudent:developers file.txt
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/

Who can use chown?

• root: Can change to any owner/group
• Regular users: Can only change group (to groups they belong to)

Related command - chgrp:

chgrp groupname file           # Change group only
chgrp -R groupname dir/        # Recursive

Symbolic links:

chown user file                # Changes link target
chown -h user link             # Changes the link itself

Note: When a file is created, the owner is the creating user and the group is their primary group.

Go deeper:

• chown(1) — OWNER:GROUP, -R, -h — the ownership syntax, recursive -R, and the -h no-dereference symlink behaviour.