Changing Ownership with chown & chgrp

Let's think about it this way for a second

chown (change owner) changes the owner user of a file or folder. Typing chown newuser file.txt changes file.txt's owner to newuser. You can also write chown newuser:newgroup file.txt to change both owner and group at once. chgrp is used when you want to change just the group. If you want to change ownership of an entire folder, including every sub-folder and file inside it, you need chown -R (recursive) — the same pattern you saw with cp -r and rm -r.

Let's connect this to a real-world scenario

On a server, you'll often need to change a website folder's owner to a deploy user (like www-data) before the web server can even read the files — sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/mysite. As an ordinary user, you can't run chown without sudo even on your own files — changing ownership is a privileged operation.

• chown = changes owner (user), chgrp = changes group
• chown user:group file = changes owner and group at once
• Use -R (recursive) to change a folder and everything inside it

Let's try it together in the terminal

sudo chown alice notes.txt
sudo chown alice:developers notes.txt
sudo chgrp developers project/
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/mysite

Running ls -la again will show the owner column changed to the new user.