How to Change Group Ownership Using chgrp in Linux

How to Change Group Ownership Using `chgrp` in Linux

Welcome to this Linux tutorial! Today, we’re going to learn how to use the chgrp command, which stands for “change group”.

In Linux, every file has an owner and a group. The group is important when you're sharing files with others who are in the same group.

Let’s say you have a file that you want to share with your team, and you want to change its group ownership to match your team’s group. That’s where chgrp comes in.

🔧 Step 1: Check the current group ownership

First, let’s create a sample file so we can experiment.

touch sample.txt
ls -l sample.txt

-rw-r--r-- 1 youruser yourgroup 0 Jul  2 10:00 sample.txt

Here, yourgroup is the current group. Let’s say we want to change it to a group called devteam.

👥 Step 2: Check if the group exists

getent group devteam

devteam:x:1002:alice,bob

If you don’t see output like this, you might need to ask your system admin to create the group or use sudo groupadd devteam if you have permissions.

🔁 Step 3: Change the group ownership using `chgrp`

sudo chgrp devteam sample.txt
ls -l sample.txt

-rw-r--r-- 1 youruser devteam 0 Jul  2 10:00 sample.txt

Now you can see the group has changed from yourgroup to devteam. Great job!

📁 Bonus: Change group ownership recursively for a directory

If you want to change group ownership for all files in a folder:

sudo chgrp -R devteam /path/to/folder

The -R flag stands for “recursive” and will apply the group change to all files and subdirectories.

✅ Summary

chgrp changes group ownership of files and directories
Use ls -l to check current ownership
Use sudo chgrp groupname filename to change group
Add -R for recursive changes on folders

That’s it! You’ve now learned how to change group ownership using chgrp in Linux. Practice it a few times, and you’ll be comfortable managing file permissions like a pro.

See you in the next tutorial!

⬅ Previous TopicHow to Change File Ownership in Linux

Next Topic ⮕Understanding Linux File Permission Symbols (r, w, x)

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How to Change Group Ownership Using chgrp