Use chown to set the ownership of all a folder's subfolders and files?
From chown --help
:
Usage: chown [OPTION]... [OWNER][:[GROUP]] FILE...
or: chown [OPTION]... --reference=RFILE FILE...
Change the owner and/or group of each FILE to OWNER and/or GROUP.
[...]
-R, --recursive operate on files and directories recursively
[...]
So you need to run (probably with sudo
):
chown -R USERNAME:GROUPNAME /PATH/TO/FILE
Or, if the group shall be the specified user's primary group (usually same name), you can also omit the GROUPNAME
and just give the USERNAME:
with a colon (no space before it!). It will be set implicitly:
chown -R USERNAME: /PATH/TO/FILE
To only change the user and leave the group as it is, just specify USERNAME
and no group name and no colon:
chown -R USERNAME /PATH/TO/FILE
To only change the group and leave the owner user as it is, just specify :GROUPNAME
with a leading colon:
chown -R :GROUPNAME /PATH/TO/FILE
My username is timo and I did this to take ownership to all my files and folders on home directory (transferred from another account):
~$ sudo chown -R timo /home/timo/*
chown -R <username>:<groupname> <folder>
This is how I normally do it, and I usually do this one folder at a time. Doesn't take but a few moments to work through each folder.