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corsiKa
Asked: 2021-05-13 09:16:40 +0800 CST

chown won't change ownership

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I've created a directory as root, but when I try to change ownership if it, it won't change! I have no idea why. (I've snipped the results of ls -halg for brevity, in case you're wondering why some files are missing...)

root@localhost:/opt/tomcat/conf# mkdir Catalina
root@localhost:/opt/tomcat/conf# ls -halg
total 244K
drwxr-x--- 3 tomcat 4.0K May 12 17:09 .
drwxr-xr-x 9 tomcat 4.0K May 10 02:34 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root   4.0K May 12 17:09 Catalina
-rw-r----- 1 tomcat  13K May 12 15:32 catalina.policy
-rw-r----- 1 tomcat 7.1K Mar 30 10:29 catalina.properties
root@localhost:/opt/tomcat/conf# chown tomcat Catalina
root@localhost:/opt/tomcat/conf# ls -halg
total 244K
drwxr-x--- 3 tomcat 4.0K May 12 17:09 .
drwxr-xr-x 9 tomcat 4.0K May 10 02:34 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root   4.0K May 12 17:09 Catalina
-rw-r----- 1 tomcat  13K May 12 15:32 catalina.policy
-rw-r----- 1 tomcat 7.1K Mar 30 10:29 catalina.properties
root@localhost:/opt/tomcat/conf#

When I made the tomcat directory yesterday, it was happy to chown -R /opt/tomcat everything to the tomcat user like it should. I'm really at a loss at why such a simple command fails.

linux chown

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    On the one hand:

    chown with a simple user parameter, not including the separator : (or obsolete .) changes the user ownership of further given file(s) and leaves the group ownership of the file(s) unchanged.

    On the other hand:

    ls -halg displays only the group ownership of a file in its output because of the included option -g.

    Thus changing only the user, which worked (no error was displayed) didn't change the result of ls -halg. ls -hal should have been used here to see the change.

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