How can I become the owner of a file that origins from another pc / user?

Question

I have a file from another pc with ubuntu, the owner of the file is my user account from this pc. How do I change the owner to my useraccount on another pc so that I can use it?

When i try to change file permissons via nautilus i get the message you're not the owner, that's the reason you can't file permissions.

But i'm the owner just on another Ubuntu with another account. Do i first have to change the rights on the origin Filesystem or can i take the rights somehow over?

Answer 1

Command line instructions:

Use the chown command.

Example:

sudo chown user file

Where user is the username on the second pc. This needs to be run from the second pc.

GUI instructions:

Run Nautilus with sudo privileges

• Alt+F2
• Enter gksu nautilus.

• Enter your password.

• Now you can right-click on a file, go to the Permissions tab and select the new owner from the Owner combobox.

  

Answer 2

To be more precise, you can change one file to you as the owner and owning group by

sudo chown nes:nes filename.txt

(replace "nes" by your username and "filename.txt" by the file name).

To change the owner of a whole directory to you, use the "-R" flag for "recursive":

sudo chown -R nes:nes folderName

But: DO NOT do this with any system folder (/usr, /root, /, /boot, /etc...), but ONLY with folders in your home directory or you WILL break your system.

If you use "ls -l" and it shows you the owner of the files as "1002", you can use

find . -uid 1002 -exec chown nes:nes {} +

... to change all users of all files owned by "1002" to "nes" in the current directory you are in and all sub-directories.