I am relatively knew to Ubuntu and I want to learn about the chown command, so I tried to read the man chown but I find it very difficult to understand. Is there a document for this that is simpler and easier to understand?
4 Answers
Actually there is such documentation. Open a command line terminal - CtrlAltT and enter:
info chown
you will find this document uses less technical terms and phrasing, and explains the command in a more "conversational" manner. It is therefore easier to read and understand for beginner users.
After reading the info page I recommend familiarizing yourself with the man page for chown, because the man pages tend to be more succinct and complete.
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info chowntakes you to the documentation of the libc function.info coreutils chowntakes you to the command's documentation. Though maybe it's different because I'm running Arch.– JoLJul 17, 2018 at 18:25 -
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I suggest installing tldr project:
$ tldr chown
# chown
Change user and group ownership of files and folders.
- Change the owner user of a file/folder:
chown user path/to/file
- Change the owner user and group of a file/folder:
chown user:group path/to/file
- Recursively change the owner of a folder and its contents:
chown -R user path/to/folder
- Change the owner of a symbolic link:
chown -h user path/to/symlink
- Change the owner of a file/folder to match a reference file:
chown --reference=path/to/reference_file path/to/file
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Wanted to post same answer; I got this from dev.to srticle; also can be installed on Mac (
brew install tldr).– KyslikJul 18, 2018 at 6:41
Not supposed to post link only answers (for which I apologise) but I think this link might be what you are looking for as it explains things in simple detail with examples.
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4Link-only answers are acceptable if the entire point of the question is to find documentation ("the linked resource contains the answer" vs. "this linked resource is the answer"). We don't require or want those to be cited in-line. ;-] Jul 17, 2018 at 9:44
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@DavidFoerster: Still, there's a reasonable chance that this answer will be useless in a few months or years. Jul 19, 2018 at 7:30
I love the linux today tutorials. Just google linux today and command you are looking for. Most common commands have articles.
[OWNER][:[GROUP]]means that you can omitowneror:[group]or both or none; the brackets in:[group]indicate that you can omit the actual group; the description explains what happens then (" If a colon but no group name follows the user name, [...] the group of the files is changed to that user's login group."find) include examples but many which would profit from some don't, at least on my cygwin here (e.g.tar).