What is the point of chgrp?

Question

I know what chgrp and chown do.
My question is since chown does the same thing as chgrp (and even more), what is the point of chgrp?

Unix philosophy: One tool to do one thing. Make a simple and work. Not complex. — SailorCire, Oct 29 '14 at 17:12
Historically, the chown command accepted only a new owner, or maybe owner[:group]. You couldn't say just chown :groupname, so the chgrp command was necessary. — G-Man Says 'Reinstate Monica', Oct 29 '14 at 17:19

score 14 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 29 '14 at 17:27

When you use chgrp you are using a simple tool to change one thing... group permissions. For many people this is preferred over using chown, especially when you run the risk of mistyping a character while using the chown command and completely breaking permissions to whatever files/folder you specified.

So instead of doing one of the following:

chown user:group [file/dir]
chown :group [file/dir]

You just do:

chgrp group [file/dir]

This keeps the risks of changing file permissions in a production grade environment down. Which is always good for SysAdmins.

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 05 '18 at 15:39

2

Remember:

A file is owned by exactly one group and one user. That file may have varying permissions depending on the user and/or group attempting to use it.
chown changes ownership of files to specified user/group
chmod changes permissions of files to specified user/group
chgrp changes ownership of files to specified group

edited Apr 05 '18 at 15:39

Kusalananda

333,661

answered Apr 05 '18 at 15:31

KeyC0de

143

What is the point of chgrp?

2 Answers2