Recursively change the owner of all files in a directory

Contributed by qmchenry September 15, 2003  
Tagged: UNIX

Using the chown command, the owner of unix files can be changed. An option of chown allows you to change the ownership of all files and subdirectories of a directory.

To change the owner to webmaster of all files in the directory called html in the current working directory:

chown -R webmaster html

You can add the UNIX group information (for example, www) to this command to recursively change the user and group in one command:

chown -R webmaster:www html