I am relatively knew to Ubuntu and I want to learn about the chown command, so I tried to read the man chown but I find it very difficult to understand. Is there a document for this that is simpler and easier to understand?
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SurvivalMachine
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Jagdeep Tannenbaum
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2You might be interested in reading https://askubuntu.com/q/918379/295286 for basics. – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Jul 17 '18 at 07:30
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6Actually I'd like to encourage you to try to understand the man page. It needs some getting used to, but the format is uniform. A few hints: rectangular brackets in the synopsis indicate optional items. These can be nested. E.g. `[OWNER][:[GROUP]]` means that you can omit `owner` or `:[group]` or both or none; the brackets in `:[group]` indicate that you can omit the actual group; the description explains what happens then (" If a colon but no group name follows the user name, [...] the group of the files is changed to that user's login group." – Peter - Reinstate Monica Jul 17 '18 at 16:57
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1But then I didn't know about the tldr project Nykakin mentions in his answer. Awesome, even for more experienced users, because it just covers 90% of your daily use cases. Some man pages (e.g. for `find`) include examples but many which would profit from some don't, at least on my cygwin here (e.g. `tar`). – Peter - Reinstate Monica Jul 17 '18 at 17:00
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Online versions can be found which sometimes are tweaked a bit e.g. https://ss64.com/bash/chown.html . https://ss64.com/bash/chmod.html is is especially helpful for new users as it has a nice little tick box calculator for using the numeric options. – Wilf Jul 18 '18 at 14:23
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Actually there is such documentation. Open a command line terminal - CtrlAltT and enter:
info chown
you will find this document uses less technical terms and phrasing, and explains the command in a more "conversational" manner. It is therefore easier to read and understand for beginner users.
After reading the info page I recommend familiarizing yourself with the man page for chown, because the man pages tend to be more succinct and complete.
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3`info chown` takes you to the documentation of the libc function. `info coreutils chown` takes you to the command's documentation. Though maybe it's different because I'm running Arch. – JoL Jul 17 '18 at 18:25
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I suggest installing tldr project:
$ tldr chown
# chown
Change user and group ownership of files and folders.
- Change the owner user of a file/folder:
chown user path/to/file
- Change the owner user and group of a file/folder:
chown user:group path/to/file
- Recursively change the owner of a folder and its contents:
chown -R user path/to/folder
- Change the owner of a symbolic link:
chown -h user path/to/symlink
- Change the owner of a file/folder to match a reference file:
chown --reference=path/to/reference_file path/to/file
Nykakin
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Wanted to post same answer; I got this from dev.to srticle; also can be installed on Mac (`brew install tldr`). – Kyslik Jul 18 '18 at 06:41
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Not supposed to post link only answers (for which I apologise) but I think this link might be what you are looking for as it explains things in simple detail with examples.
graham
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4Link-only answers are acceptable if the entire point of the question is to find documentation ("the linked resource *contains* the answer" vs. "this linked resource *is* the answer"). We don't require or want those to be cited in-line. ;-] – David Foerster Jul 17 '18 at 09:44
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@DavidFoerster: Still, there's a reasonable chance that this answer will be useless in a few months or years. – Eric Duminil Jul 19 '18 at 07:30
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I love the linux today tutorials. Just google linux today and command you are looking for. Most common commands have articles.
Carol McAnulty
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