chown?
 

I am very new to linux so i am going to look very stupid.

I just bought a dedicated server with redhat linux on it and I have no idea what i am doing.
I was talking to my host and they said I need to chown a directory. How do I do that?

any help is helpful to me :P

Chown = Change ownership

This is used to change the group or user ownership of a file or directory.

chown <username> <filename or directory name>

eg.

chown user1 XXX.jpg ;)

By the Way
 

You can type man (with a space between them) in front of the command and press enter and that will bring up a manual of the command does and how-to use it.

Chown may work better if you use it such as for the /home/user directory like this:

chown username.users directory

That way you, the user and the group users can use that folder depending on what permissions you set using chmod. Use chown -R (recursive) if you want to chown the directory and everything in it. I can't think of any folder at the moment that only has or can have only one owner.??.

ok im in with telnet and type:
chown admin /var/www/html

and it tells me this:
Operation not permitted


what am i doing wrong?

possible causes
 

1. Were you doing this as root? You usually have to be root to chown.
2. Is admin a valid user? I don't think a group can be the owner, I believe that it must be a user.

 

Try to use
su
before you try chown. Su will ask you for root password. Then you may use whoami and see you're root. Now use chmod.