What is the point of chgrp?

Question

I know what chgrp and chown do.
My question is since chown does the same thing as chgrp (and even more), what is the point of chgrp?

Solution 1

When you use chgrp you are using a simple tool to change one thing... group permissions. For many people this is preferred over using chown, especially when you run the risk of mistyping a character while using the chown command and completely breaking permissions to whatever files/folder you specified.

So instead of doing one of the following:

chown user:group [file/dir]
chown :group [file/dir]

You just do:

chgrp group [file/dir]

This keeps the risks of changing file permissions in a production grade environment down. Which is always good for SysAdmins.

Solution 2

Remember:

• A file is owned by exactly one group and one user. That file may have varying permissions depending on the user and/or group attempting to use it.
• chown changes ownership of files to specified user/group
• chmod changes permissions of files to specified user/group
• chgrp changes ownership of files to specified group