Why use chown

Linux uses three types of permissions: Read: This permission allows the user to read files and in directories, it lets the user read directories and subdirectories stores in it. Write: This permission allows a user to modify and delete a file. Also it allows a user to modify its contents create, delete and rename files in it for the directories. Unless the execute permission is not given to directories changes does do affect them.

Execute: The write permission on a file allows it to get executed. For example, if we have a file named php. Types of file Permissions: User: These type of file permission affect the owner of the file. Group: These type of file permission affect the group which owns the file. Instead of the group permissions, the user permissions will apply if the owner user is in this group. Other: These type of file permission affect all other users on the system.

Note: To view the permissions we use: ls -l chown command is used to change the file Owner or group. Whenever you want to change ownership you can use chown command. Assume that if you are user named user1 and you want to change ownership to root where your current directory is user1. That's why we have questions like these: superuser. I too upvoted just for the comic :- However, you may want to expand on chmod. The reason it's not called chperm other than early UNIX bods not liking long command names is that it's for other things as well setuid, setgid, stick bits, etc.

Hence the name "change mode". Show 1 more comment. No octal def though? WinEunuuchs2Unix haha thanks I deliberately chose a particularly useless permissions setting.

If I really start explaining when and why to use every possible permutation of chmod and chown which is too broad a question by far my answer will go on forever. It seems like the link to the article is broken, here is the fixed one: this short guide — Pavel Sapehin. When considering the permissions of a file or directory, or whatever , there are two factors: who owns the file - the user and group, and what they can do with it - read, write, execute or a combination thereof.

Simple Unix permissions classify users trying to access a file into three types: the owner of the file users who are members of the group owning the file everybody else chown is used to change the first two. Adam Adam 4 4 silver badges 16 16 bronze badges. Bruno Finger Bruno Finger 1 1 silver badge 13 13 bronze badges. The Overflow Blog.

Does ES6 make JavaScript frameworks obsolete? Podcast Do polyglots have an edge when it comes to mastering programming Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Linked Related Hot Network Questions. Don't worry too much about memorizing this table for now, it will come with time and practice. You will see the terms read, write, and execute thrown around a lot when it comes to Linux file permissions. So let's review what they mean for both files and directories.

For simplicity, we'll focus on regular files from here on out. Just keep in mind that other file types like directories are affected by chmod and chown as well. For example, to change our "learningnotes. As expected, after the command the permissions on the file change to rw——-. Which makes sense. The first "rw" tells us the file owner had read and write privileges. The 7 "-" characters after that tell us the owner does not have execute permissions and no one else has any permissions.

Suppose we wanted to change it the owner can only read, but not write to, the file. In that case, "chmod learningnotes. Again, the "ls -l" output updates as we expect.

If we want to give the user and group that owns the file read and write permissions, and everyone else read-only permissions, that is achieved using "chmod learningnotes. Remember: In the above examples, we just used "learningnotes. To use chmod on files in other directories, be sure to include the path to the files e.

Those basic examples using octal permissions should be enough for you to get started with chmod. In fact, understanding how those work will likely be enough for many real-world applications. However, there are other ways to use chmod as well. Here is a quick breakdown of the more common supported characters for symbolic representation with chmod:. For example, if we start with our "learningnotes. While chmod handles what users can do with a file once they have access to it, chown assigns ownership.

As you may have noticed, none of the chmod commands we discussed above changed who owns the files we're working with.