Sudo chown bob:staff ~/Desktop/test-file.txtĪgain, you usually won’t need to change the files group, though occasionally you will run into a file that has somehow lost or misappropriated both it’s owning user and the access level group it once belonged to.

Typically you won’t need to change the group of a file, but you can do that with chown as well by appending it to the desired username with a colon like this: If you’re altering a system files ownership or another users files that you don’t have read and write access to, you can always proceed chown with ‘sudo’ to use chown as super user and force the change: If you’re not sure what the short user name is, type ‘whoami’ into the terminal to get the current short name, or type “ls /Users” to see a list of all user accounts on the current Mac. Keep in mind that the user name you’re looking to use is the account short name, which is usually what a home directory is named after. Launch Terminal from /Applications/Utilities/ to get started.įor a usage example, to change the ownership of a file named “test-file.txt” to the user “Bob” the command would be: Here we’ll walk through the basics of changing file owners through the ‘chown’ command, which is standard in Mac OS X and also nearly all variations of unix. Using the command line is generally considered more advanced, but for some situations it’s not only faster than going through the graphical interface, but in some regards it’s easier too. Change File Ownership with chown from the Command Line Don’t be intimidated by a command prompt, we’ll walk through the process and as you’ll see it’s actually pretty simple. While going through the Finder is undoubtedly easy, it’s still several steps long and the Terminal can be faster in many ways. Now select the name and click the gear icon, selecting “Make (username) the owner”.

Click the button to add a new owner, then add the user from the list and choose “Select”.

Select the lock icon to unlock preferences.Click the arrow alongside “Sharing & Permissions” to reveal the ownership and permissions options.Select the file in the Finder, then hit Command+i to summon the “Get Info” window.

Mac create new file in users folder