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Change File Ownership

Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

Recall that both a user/owner and a group can have file or directory permissions that are differentiated from the
permissions of other users. The need commonly arises where the user or group ownership for files and/or directories need to be changed.

For example, if user sally, in group finance has responsibility for a number of files and Sally gets transferred to the purchasing group the ownership of the files would need to be changed to marge because Marge is the user who is taking Sally’s place in finance. The chown command is used to change file or directory ownership.

If a number of files that are currently accessed by the test group are ready for production and need to be changed to the prod group, the chgrp command can be used to give access to the prod group.

Actually the chown command can be used to change both user and group ownership, while the chgrp command can only be used to change group ownership as we will see in the next sections of this chapter. When using either chown or chgrp commands, the system will first check the permissions of the user who is issuing the commands to make certain they have sufficient permissions to allow the change.