From the course: Linux: Files and Permissions

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File ownership

File ownership

- [Instructor] Before we talk about setting permissions, we need to talk about file ownership. A file is owned by exactly one user and one group. If we do an ls -l on a file, we'll see that the long listing includes the file's owners. I'm using a fictitious file named file.txt as an example. You can do a long list on any file in your operating system to see similar data. The user owner is the third column from the left. The group owner is the fourth column. The command that we use to change the ownership of a file is chown. The syntax is chown space options space username colon group name space file name. To set the user owner, we'd just use one name, for instance, chown space user1 space file.txt, which would change the user owner to user1. Keep in mind that in order to change the ownership of a file, you need to be root or elevate privileges with sudo. To set the group owner, the syntax would be chown space :group space…

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