How to find owner and group of a directory?

You can do this: 1st way:

ls -l /path/to/file

*the third field in the ls -l output is the user and the fourth is the group

2nd way:

stat /path/to/file

$ stat py
  File: `py'
  Size: 32              Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: 801h/2049d      Inode: 429064      Links: 1
Access: (0777/-rwxrwxrwx)  Uid: ( 1000/  razvan)   Gid: ( 1000/  razvan)
Access: 2012-07-27 17:49:05.682143441 +0300
Modify: 2012-07-01 03:58:02.848540175 +0300
Change: 2012-08-01 21:12:57.129819212 +0300

The razvan in the Uid field is the owner/user, the razvan in the Gid field is the group. 8-|

3rd way: Get only the user and group with stat:

stat -c "%U %G" /path/to/file

Run ls with the -l flag to show the owner and group-owner of files and directories in the current directory (or in a specific named directory).

~$ ls -l
drwxr-xr-x  2 owner group 4096 Aug 12 19:12 Desktop
...

~$ ls -l /home/username
drwxr-xr-x  2 owner group 4096 Aug 12 19:12 Desktop
...

Run ls with the -l and -d flags to show this information about the current directory itself (or about a specific named directory):

~$ ls -ld
drwxr-xr-x  2 owner group 4096 Aug 12 19:12 .

~$ ls -ld ~/Desktop
drwxr-xr-x  2 owner group 4096 Aug 12 19:12 Desktop

To get the owner and group of a directory you need

ls -ld /path/to/folder

Otherwise you get the attributes of the contents of the directory.

In Nautilus (the GUI file manager)

• Find the folder corresponding to the directory

• Right click it.

• Select Properties

• Select the Permissions Tab

Providing you have the permission to change the permissions you can change them from that window, too.

My subtle way

ls -alF /path/to/folder | grep -Ei ' ./'

sample output

drwxr-xr-x 2 some-user some-group 4096 Feb 28 02:29 ./