Initially, the owner of a file is the user who creates it. The chown command is used to change the ownership of files and directories. In order to change the ownership you would require administrative access. A regular user cannot use this command to change the ownership of a file, or even to give the ownership of one of their own files to another user.
The chown command does not only allow you to change user but also group ownership.
The syntax
chown [OPTIONS] [OWNER] FILE
Remember our previous examples, we are going to work with them here too:
lets say we had something like this
admin@localhost:~$ cd ~/Documents
Currently all the files in the Documents directory are owned by the admin user. Have a doubt? lets verify that. If you remember the ls -l if you run this it will indicate user owner of each file, have a look
admin@localhost:~/Documents$ ls -l
total 5
drwx------ 5 admin admin 4096 Dec 20 2017 School
drwx------ 2 admin admin 4096 Dec 20 2017 Work
-rw-r--r-- 1 admin admin 39 Dec 20 2017 adjectives.txt
-rwxr--r-- 1 admin admin 647 Dec 20 2017 hello.sh
-rw-r--r-- 1 admin admin 67 Dec 20 2017 hidden.txt
Now if we wanted to switch the owner of hello.sh to the root, we will have to use root as the first argument and hello.sh as second argument, and remember to use sudo command in order to gain the necessary administrative privileges. After running this you will have to enter your password and that's all.
admin@localhost:~/Documents$ sudo chown root hello.sh
[sudo] password for admin:
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