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How to change group of a file on Linux?

January 2023 • 121 words • 1 min read

On Linux and other Unix like systems, if you want to check the user who owns a file, you can use ls -l comand:

# /tmp/test1 is the name of the file
$ ls -l /tmp/test1
-rw-r--r--  1 abhinav  staff  1369 Jan 29 10:28 /tmp/test1

Change file owner using chown

If you want to change the owner of the file to say a user named deploy, do the following:

# /tmp/test1 is the name of the file
$ chown deploy /tmp/test1
$ ls -l /tmp/test1
-rw-r--r--  1 deploy  staff  1369 Jan 29 10:28 /tmp/test1

Change the group of the file using chgrp

If you want to change the group the file belongs to, you can do the following:

# /tmp/test1 is the name of the file
$ chgrp deploy /tmp/test1
$ ls -l /tmp/test1
-rw-r--r--  1 deploy  deploy  1369 Jan 29 10:28 /tmp/test1

BTW, there’s another shortcut. You can use chown command to change the group too.

# /tmp/test1 is the name of the file
$ chown deploy:deploy /tmp/test1
$ ls -l /tmp/test1
-rw-r--r--  1 deploy  staff  1369 Jan 29 10:28 /tmp/test1

There’s another helpful command chmod that can you manage read, write and execute permissions at a much granular level. I will write more on chmod in a later post. Meanwhile, you can read more about chown, chgrp and chmod by using man command.

$ man chmod