Chgrp


, short for change group, is a shell command for changing the group associated with a Unix-based file system file including special files such as directories. Changing the group of a file is restricted to a super-user or to the file's owning user if the user is in the specified group.
A file has access permissions for the owning user, a group and for others. Changing the group for a file changes access to it based on users' group memberships.

History

The command was originally developed as part of the Unix operating system by AT&T Bell Laboratories. It is available in most Unix-like systems, Plan 9, Inferno and IBM i.
The version of chgrp bundled in GNU coreutils was written by David MacKenzie.

Use

Generally, the syntax can be described as:
chgrp group ''files
  • group specifies the group with which the files should be associated; may be either a symbolic name or an identifier
  • files'' specifies one or more files, which may be the result of a glob expression like
Options:
  • Recurse through directories
  • Verbose output: log the name of each file changed
  • Force or forge ahead even if an error occurs

    Examples

The following demonstrates changing the group of files matching to staff provided the user owns the files and is a member of staff. The change will allow members of the group staff to modify the files since the group-class permissions will apply, not the others-class permissions.

$ ls -l *.conf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 gbeeker wheel 3545 Nov 04 2011 prog.conf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 gbeeker wheel 3545 Nov 04 2011 prox.conf
$ chgrp staff *.conf
$ ls -l *.conf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 gbeeker staff 3545 Nov 04 2011 prog.conf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 gbeeker staff 3545 Nov 04 2011 prox.conf