chown changes the owner of the filenames to owner. The owner may be either a decimal user ID (UID) or a login name found in the password file. An optional group may also be specified. The group may be either a decimal group ID (GID) or a group name found in the GID file.

Only the super-user can change owner, in order to simplify accounting procedures.

-f

Do not report errors.

-R

Recursively descend into directories setting the ownership of all files in each directory encountered. When symbolic links are encountered, their ownership is changed, but they are not traversed.

See largefile(5) for the description of the behavior of chown when encountering files greater than or equal to 2 Gbyte ( 2³¹ bytes).

/etc/passwd

password file

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

chgrp(1), chown(2), group(4), passwd(4), attributes(5), largefile(5)