User and Group Ownership

Let's pretend you have a file called mail_test and you want to change its ownership from the root user to natika. You first have to log in as root, because only root can change root's ownership of a file. This is very simple:

 chown natika mail_test 

You can also use the -R option to change ownership recursively. Let's use a directory called test_directory as an example. Once again, it belongs to root and you want to make every file in that directory (and below) owned by natika:

 chown  R natika test_directory 

The format for changing group ownership is just as easy. Let's change the group ownership of test_directory (previously owned by root) so that it and all its files and subdirectories belong to group accounts:

 chgrp  R accounts test_directory 

You can even combine the two formats. In the following example, the ownership of the entire finance_data directory changes to natika as the owner and accounts as the group. To do so, you use this form of the chown command:

 chown  R natika.accounts finance_data 

Quick Tip

You can use the -R flag to recursively change everything in a subdirectory with chgrp and chmod as well.

So now files (and directories) are owned by some user and some group. This brings us to the next question.