Ubuntu 16.04 correct way to specify a directory / folder using terminal chown to recursively change ownership / permissions

Question

OK - so I open terminal and I want to use chown to change permissions / ownership recursively. I want to use

sudo chown -R username:group directory

The folder I want to change permissions on is opt/lampp what would be the correct replacement for 'directory' to change permissions on opt/lampp - if the following was my command to recursively replace ownership on the parent directory all subfolders and all files for the lampp directory and I am a sudo user, the command would be

sudo chown -R myname:sudo what goes here ?

please tell me what I would enter in terminal instead of 'what goes here'

Thanks

Answer 1

I would suggest you first cd /opt and then run sudo chown -R username:group ./lammp .

The reason for that is simple: if you by accident add space between / and opt when running sudo chown -R username:group /opt/lammp , that'll be bad. In fact this is a common error we see on Ask Ubuntu a lot - new users do this mistake by accident and as a result their system becomes extremely difficult to recover. Thus , cd first, chown second