Change Group Ownership of Symbolic Links in Unix or Linux

chgrp can be used to change group ownership of files and directories in almost all UNIX-variant platforms, including Linux such as Fedora Core, Ubunto and etc. However, if you try to change the group membership of a symbolic link, the group ownership of its referenced or linked file is changed instead.

This is the default behavior of chgrp command, where dereference option is used by default so that all changes will affect the referent of each symbolic link, rather than the symbolic link itself.

To change the group ownership of symbolic link, simply use the -h or –no-dereference flag to the chgrp command.

Example:

chgrp -h new_group symbolic_link_name

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 3:25 am and is filed under Operating Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Change Group Ownership of Symbolic Links in Unix or Linux”

  1. Lars
    January 17th, 2009 08:34
    1

    Thanks for the tip. I was always frustrated by not being able to change the ownership of symlinks. Definitely good to know.

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