In Linux, each file is associated with an owner and a group and has permissions that determine which users may read, write, or execute the file.
chgrp command changes the group ownership of given files.
This guide explains how to use
chgrp Command Syntax
chgrp command takes the following form:
chgrp [OPTIONS] GROUP FILE..
GROUP, name of the new group or the group ID (GID). Numeric GID must be prefixed with the
FILE.., name of one or more files.
chown command that allows you to change the user and group ownership,
chgrp changes only the group ownership.
To find out to which group the file belongs to, use the
ls -l command.
Only root or user with sudo privileges can change the group ownership of a file.
How to Change the File Group Ownership
To change the group ownership of a file or directory invoke the
chgrp command followed by the new group name and the target file as arguments.
For example, to change the group of the file
www-data you would run:
chgrp www-data filename
If you run the command with an unprivileged user, you will get “Operation not permitted” error. To suppress the errors, run the command with the
-f option. By default, on success,
chgrp doesn’t produce any output and returns zero.
You can also pass multiple files as arguments to the
chgrp www-data file1 file2 dir1
-v option to get information about the files that are being processed:
chgrp www-data file1 file2
changed group of 'file1' from nginx to www-data group of 'file2' retained as www-data
To print information only about those files which group actually changes use
-c instead of
The numeric group ID (GID) can be used instead of the username. The following example changes the file’s group ownership to a new group with GID of 1000:
chgrp +1000 filename
How to Change Symlinks Group Ownership
When not operating recursively, the default behavior of the
chgrp command is to change the group ownership of the symlink targets, not the symbolic links themselves.
For example, if you try to change the group of the symbolic link
symlink1 that points to
chgrp will change the ownership of the file or directory the symlink points to:
chgrp www-data symlink1
The chances are that instead of changing the target group, you will get a “cannot dereference ‘symlink1’: Permission denied” error.
The error happens because by default on most Linux distributions symlinks are protected, and you cannot operate on target files. This option is specified in
1 means enabled and
0 disabled. We recommend not to disable the symlink protection.
To change the group ownership of the symlink itself, use the
chgrp -h www-data symlink1
How to Recursively Change the Group Ownership
To recursively change the group ownership of all files and directories under a given directory, use the
For example, the following command will change the ownership of all files and directories under the
/var/www directory to the
chgrp -R www-data /var/www
When the recursive option is specified
chgrp will not traverse the symbolic links and will make no changes to the symlinks. To change the group ownership of the symbolic links, pass the
chgrp -hR www-data /var/www
Other options that can be used when recursively changing the group ownership are
If the argument passed to
chgrp command is a symbolic link, the
-H option will cause the command to traverse it.
chgrp to traverse each symlink to a directory that is encountered. In most cases, you should not use these options because you might mess up your system or create a security risk.
chgrp changes the group ownership of files, directories, and symlinks.
Although you can use the more popular
chown command to change the group,
chgrp has a simple syntax which is easy to remember.
For more information about the
chgrp command, visit the chgrp man page or type
man chgrp in your terminal.
If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment.