How to perform chown and chgrp in one command

Question

In order to change both a file's owner and group we can do this:

chown trump file
chgrp trump file

but can I do both commands in one approach or one command?

score 35 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 03 '17 at 15:50

35

per chown man page chown user:group file:

chown trump:trump file

answered Aug 03 '17 at 15:50

sebasth

5

Or `chown trump: file` if `trump` is the primary group of user `trump` – xhienne Aug 03 '17 at 15:52
1

Or `chown user.group filename` or `chown .group filename` – ivanivan Aug 03 '17 at 17:11
5

POSIX specifies allowed characters for user and group names. (http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap03.html#tag_03_278) The BSD `chown` manual states "Previous versions of the chown utility used the dot (`.`) character to distinguish the group name. This has been changed to be a colon (`:`) character, so that user and group names may contain the dot character." The RHEL man page for `chown` does not have that usage note. Nonetheless, there are reasons to abstain from using the `.` character. – Christopher Aug 03 '17 at 17:31
3

Be careful what `username:` and `:groupname` are **not** standards - see https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/136989/383045 – Manuel Jordan Sep 22 '21 at 01:51

1 Answers1