How to Change File Ownership in Linux (chown)

chown changes which user and group owns a file or directory.

Key points

• chown user:group file.txt sets both the owning user and group in one command
• chown -R applies the ownership change recursively to a directory and everything inside it
• Only the root user (or a user with sudo) can change ownership to a different user

Example

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/app