Skip to main content

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

4
  • 5
    Or chown trump: file if trump is the primary group of user trump Commented Aug 3, 2017 at 15:52
  • 1
    Or chown user.group filename or chown .group filename Commented Aug 3, 2017 at 17:11
  • 5
    POSIX specifies allowed characters for user and group names. (pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/…) The BSD chown manual states "Previous versions of the chown utility used the dot (.) character to distinguish the group name. This has been changed to be a colon (:) character, so that user and group names may contain the dot character." The RHEL man page for chown does not have that usage note. Nonetheless, there are reasons to abstain from using the . character. Commented Aug 3, 2017 at 17:31
  • 3
    Be careful what username: and :groupname are not standards - see unix.stackexchange.com/a/136989/383045 Commented Sep 22, 2021 at 1:51