How do I change the group ownership of a file in Ubuntu?

linux bash ubuntu access-rights
PuchuKing33 picture PuchuKing33 · Feb 18, 2014 · Viewed 16.9k times · Source

I have a little question on how to change the group owner of a file. At the moment the group of the file is the same as my user name but I want to change it so another user can access that same file and read/write to it.

Answer

Jens picture Jens · Feb 18, 2014

The syntax would be

chown user:group file ...

This usually (=when you're not root) only works as long as you are a member of the same group (since otherwise by chown'ing files you could exceed the other user's disk quota).

If you both are in the same group you could also allow write access with

chmod g+w file

As above this will allow all members of group write access.

If you do not share a common group, all you can safely do is to allow read access to the file so the other user can make a copy of it and edit his/her copy.

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