Networking / Beginners

Commands for Managing Ownership and Permissions

This section presents the details of the chown and chmod commands, which are the essential tools for assigning file system rights in the Linux environment. You can view the ownership and permissions for a file using the ls command with the -l option.

The chown command

The chown command changes the owner of a file. Normally, the user who creates a file is the owner of the file. However, the owner can transfer the file to someone else via this command. The basic syntax of this command is

chown user file

For example, to change the owner of a file named rescue.plans to user professor, use this command:

$ chown professor rescue.plans

To change ownership of all the files in the directory named /home/island to professor, use this command:

$ chown professor /home/island

Tip Issuing the following command would be a really bad idea:

$ chown gilligan rescue.plans
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In this tutorial:

  1. Linux Commands
  2. Command Shell Basics
  3. Editing commands
  4. Wildcards
  5. Redirection and piping
  6. Environment variables
  7. Shell scripts
  8. Directory and File Handling Commands
  9. The cd command
  10. The mkdir command
  11. The rmdir command
  12. The ls command
  13. The cp command
  14. The rm command
  15. The mv command
  16. The touch command
  17. The cat command
  18. Commands for Working with Packages and Services
  19. The rpm command
  20. Commands for Administering Users
  21. The usermod command
  22. The chage command
  23. The passwd command
  24. The newusers command
  25. The groupadd command
  26. The groupdel command
  27. Commands for Managing Ownership and Permissions
  28. The chgrp command
  29. The chmod command
  30. Networking Commands
  31. The ipconfig command
  32. The netstat command
  33. The ping command
  34. The route command
  35. The traceroute command