231

How can I find out owner and group of a directory in Ubuntu?

Flyk
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Gaurav Agarwal
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5 Answers5

299

You can do this: 1st way:

ls -l /path/to/file

*the third field in the ls -l output is the user and the fourth is the group

2nd way:

stat /path/to/file

$ stat py
  File: `py'
  Size: 32              Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: 801h/2049d      Inode: 429064      Links: 1
Access: (0777/-rwxrwxrwx)  Uid: ( 1000/  razvan)   Gid: ( 1000/  razvan)
Access: 2012-07-27 17:49:05.682143441 +0300
Modify: 2012-07-01 03:58:02.848540175 +0300
Change: 2012-08-01 21:12:57.129819212 +0300

The razvan in the Uid field is the owner/user, the razvan in the Gid field is the group. 8-|

3rd way: Get only the user and group with stat:

stat -c "%U %G" /path/to/file
fromnaboo
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  • 3
    The default bashrc in ubuntu aliases ll to ls -l – Nemo Aug 13 '12 at 03:41
  • As a heads up this is for GNU stat, specific to ubuntu this works, but looking for a portable (BSD supported solution) this is not the answer for you. – Luke Exton Oct 14 '16 at 16:29
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    FWIW, on BSD (mac) this would be stat -f "%u %g" /path/to/file – KarlKFI Apr 06 '17 at 01:37
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    WARNING: "stat" returns the string "UNKNOWN" for %U and %G if it is not defined in the system files. While "ls" will return the UID/GID if unknown. It is better to work with UID (%u) and GID (%g) numbers from "stat" if possible. – anthony Dec 15 '20 at 07:28
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    Do not parse ls. More info: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs, https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/128985/133353 – Artfaith Apr 09 '21 at 10:57
  • +1 for the part about stat, not about ls – Sandburg Jun 20 '22 at 08:17
33

Run ls with the -l flag to show the owner and group-owner of files and directories in the current directory (or in a specific named directory).

~$ ls -l
drwxr-xr-x  2 owner group 4096 Aug 12 19:12 Desktop
...
~$ ls -l /home/username
drwxr-xr-x  2 owner group 4096 Aug 12 19:12 Desktop
...

Run ls with the -l and -d flags to show this information about the current directory itself (or about a specific named directory):

~$ ls -ld
drwxr-xr-x  2 owner group 4096 Aug 12 19:12 .
~$ ls -ld ~/Desktop
drwxr-xr-x  2 owner group 4096 Aug 12 19:12 Desktop
Eliah Kagan
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OrangeTux
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26

To get the owner and group of a directory you need

ls -ld /path/to/folder

Otherwise you get the attributes of the contents of the directory.

StarNamer
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5

In Nautilus (the GUI file manager)

  • Find the folder corresponding to the directory

  • Right click it.

  • Select Properties

  • Select the Permissions Tab

Providing you have the permission to change the permissions you can change them from that window, too.

John S Gruber
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2

My subtle way

ls -alF /path/to/folder | grep -Ei ' ./'

sample output

drwxr-xr-x 2 some-user some-group 4096 Feb 28 02:29 ./
Nam G VU
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