Home Linux Tips & Tricks How To Copy Files And Change The Ownership, Permissions At The Same Time

How To Copy Files And Change The Ownership, Permissions At The Same Time

By sk
Published: Last Updated on 49.3K views

This brief tutorial describes how to copy files and change the ownership, permissions at the same time from command line in Unix-like operating systems.

Usually, we use "cp" command to copy files from one location to another. Then, we use "chmod", and "chown" commands to change the permissions and ownership of a file, respectively.

However, we can combine all these tasks into a one-liner command, and still get the same result instead of running the three consecutive commands. This can be helpful when you want to do this on a regular basis, or within a script.

Copy Files And Change The Ownership, Permissions At The Same Time

Have a look at the following example.

To copy files and change permissions and ownership, we usually do:

$ cp /dir1/file1 /dir2
$ chmod 775 -R /dir2
$ chown -R newowner:newgroup /dir2/file1

However, you don't have to use three commands to this simple task. We can do this with a single command. This is where the "install" command comes in handy.

I thought "install" command is meant to install things. But, I was wrong! The "install" command is used to copy files into destination of your choice and set attributes. It is part of GNU coreutils which comes pre-installed with all Linux distributions.

Now, let me show how to change the permissions and ownership of a file during copy.

$ sudo install -C -m 775 -o sk -g ostechnix /dir1/file1 /dir2

The above command will copy the file /dir1/file1 to /dir2, change the permissions of the file to 775, the owner to sk, and the group to ostechnix.

Let us break down the above command and see what each part of command does.

  • -C, (--compare) : Compare each pair of source and destination files, and in some cases, do not modify the destination at all.
  • -m, (--mode) : Set permission mode (as in chmod).
  • -o, (--owner) : Set user ownership.
  • -g, (--group) : Set group ownership.

For more details, refer man pages.

$ man install

Suggested Read:


And, that's all. Hope this helps.

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1 comment

Mohsen August 10, 2022 - 1:33 pm

Ow! what a little devilish command!
I didn’t know this useful command.
Installing a software also means: “extract, copy and run some commands sequentially.”; which this command is doing.
Maybe if they rename it to advance copy or something similar, it would be better.
Although I know I can make an alias for it.
Is there any command like this for to moving file with changing properties?
Perhaps with another obscure command like this.
By the way, Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us.

Reply

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