How to Change File Owner and Group on Linux (chown)

Permissions decide what the owner and group may do; chown decides who the owner and group are. Set both at once with user:group, which is a root task:

sudo chown deploy:developers report.txt

The forms

sudo chown deploy file              # owner only
sudo chown deploy:developers file   # owner AND group
sudo chown :developers file         # group only (leading colon)
sudo chown deploy: file             # owner, and set group to deploy's primary group

Recursively, for a whole tree

sudo chown -R deploy:developers /srv/app

-R walks the directory. This is the standard fix after deploying files as the wrong user, or after a git clone/tar as root left everything owned by root. It pairs with recursive chmod when both owner and mode are wrong.

chown vs chgrp, and who is allowed

• Changing the owner always needs root. A normal user cannot give a file away to someone else (that would let people dodge quotas and plant files).
• Changing only the group can be done by the file's owner with chgrp, but only to a group they themselves belong to:

chgrp developers report.txt         # owner can do this if they're in developers

So chgrp (or chown :group) is sometimes available without sudo; reassigning the owner never is.

The classic case: a root-owned file you cannot edit

You ran something with sudo and now a file in your home is owned by root and you cannot write it. Hand it back:

sudo chown $USER:$USER ~/.config/app/settings.json

This is the same root cause behind sudo ssh-keygen making an unusable key: elevation created root-owned files in your space.

FAQ

See also

• Linux file permissions explained: what owner and group can each do.
• How to chmod recursively: fix modes across a tree alongside ownership.
• How to create a group on Linux: the groups you assign here.
• Fix SSH "permissions are too open": the root-owned-key case chown solves.