Can someone explain what this chown is actually doing?

Question

Can someone in detail explain what exactly the following command that a tutorial has instructed me to issue is doing?

chown -R $USER:$GROUP

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 23 '17 at 17:50

3

So it's recursively setting owner and group for any subsequently specified directory, and all below it.

chown [OPTION]... [OWNER][:[GROUP]] FILE..

-R, --recursive
    operate on files and directories recursively

answered Jun 23 '17 at 17:50

steve

There seems to be more to the $USER:$GROUP then variables. This was from a paid video tutorial on setting up a database and was done during the installation phase. It created a directory for its data files and then the next step was to issue that command exactly as typed (except the path for the directory /var/log/data followed). – user2297683 Jun 24 '17 at 10:10
OK. If you're unsure, do a echo user=$USER group=$GROUP prior to running the chown. That will definitively report to you the values that the variables currently have. – steve Jun 24 '17 at 19:45

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 16 '19 at 13:49

0

chown basically means changing the ownership of filesystem object(s) like files,directories and links etc.

chown -R $USER:$GROUP file1 dir1 ...

here we are doing two things

edited Apr 16 '19 at 13:49

Archemar

answered Feb 05 '18 at 05:22

Abhishek D K

2 Answers2