Chown and Chmod

Chown

This is an important Linux Linux shell-command. german-users: see the linuxwiki

Chown means change owner but it can do more than that. Let's look at a directory listing that you get under a Linux/Unix/Mac OS X distribution. As an example we use the TYPO3 source directory, here we use the Debian installation example.

cd /var/www/typo3/latest
 ls -l

The output looks something like this:

-rw-r--r--     1 root      root      27015 May 11 15:14 ChangeLog
-rw-r--r--     1 root      root      18007 May 11 15:14 GPL.txt
-rw-r--r--     1 root      root        459 May 11 15:14 LICENSE.txt
-rw-r--r--     1 root      root        647 May 11 15:14 Package.txt
-rw-r--r--     1 root      root        403 May 11 15:14 README.txt
-rw-r--r--     1 root      root      56300 May 11 15:14 TODO.txt
drwxr-xr-x    16 root      root       4096 May 11 15:14 misc
drwxr-xr-x     7 root      root       4096 May 11 15:14 t3lib
lrwxrwxrwx     1 root      root         22 Jul  4 20:03 tslib -> typo3/sysext/cms/tslib
drwxr-xr-x     1 root      root       4096 May 11 15:14 typo3

You see two columns with root. The first (from the left) is the owner of the file or directory and the second is the group. In this case owner and group is the same, therefore only root has any access to files and directories.

Sometimes TYPO3 needs write access for the webserver to a certain file or directory so that the webserver has write permissions.

In that case you'll have to change either the owner or the group to the webserver. Most of the time you want to change the group to the webserver and leave the owner root.

You change the group of the directory typo3 to the webserver by executing a chown.

chown -R :www-data typo3

The -R means that you change a directory (typo3 is a directory) and the colon indicates if you change the owner or the group. In our case, name on the right of the colon, the group is changed. If you just wrote www-data the owner would have been changed. You can, of course, change owner and group at the same time (e.g. root:www-data).

Look at the line with the directory typo3 again:

drwxr-xr-x     1 root      www-data   4096 May 11 15:14 typo3

Www-data is the webserver user of apache by default. Your user might be different, that doesn't matter. Just make sure you change it to the right owner or group when you need to.

The revert the change just type

chown -R :root typo3