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I was tasked to change the owner of a file called hello to vincent only if the owner was guillame. I tried to use chmod vincent:guillame hello but this is not working. Please, I need help to solve the task.

Kusalananda
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Westfiree
  • 21

2 Answers2

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chown is the command used to change ownership of files, not chmod.

find hello -user guillame -exec chown vincent {} \;

This uses find with the file hello as the "search path". If the hello file's owner is guillame, find will execute chown vincent with the file as its next argument, changing the file's ownership to vincent. If the owner of the file is not guillame, nothing will happen.

This command ought to be portable to any Unix system.

Note that this assumes that the current user has privileges that allow changing the file ownership. You may have to run either chown or find itself as root using sudo or doas or whatever other way you usually run a utility with escalated privileges on your system.

Kusalananda
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For just one file called hello:

/usr/bin/test "$(stat --format="%U" hello)" = "guillame" && sudo chown vincent foo
Pablo A
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  • Note that on Alpine Linux (or any Busybox system), you'd use stat -c %U filename (which incidentally also works on system where --format is valid); on OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and macOS, it's stat -f %Su filename. – Kusalananda Aug 31 '23 at 22:36