Change the owner and/or group of each FILE to OWNER and/or GROUP. With --reference, change the owner and group of each FILE to those of RFILE.

-c, --changes

like verbose but report only when a change is made

--dereference

affect the referent of each symbolic link, rather than the symbolic link itself (this is the default)

-h, --no-dereference

affect each symbolic link instead of any referenced file (useful only on systems that can change the ownership of a symlink)

--from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP

change the owner and/or group of each file only if its current owner and/or group match those specified here. Either may be omitted, in which case a match is not required for the omitted attribute.

--no-preserve-root do not treat `/' specially (the default)

--preserve-root

fail to operate recursively on `/'

-f, --silent, --quiet

suppress most error messages

--reference=RFILE

use RFILE's owner and group rather than the specifying OWNER:GROUP values

-R, --recursive

operate on files and directories recursively

-v, --verbose

output a diagnostic for every file processed

The following options modify how a hierarchy is traversed when the -R option is also specified. If more than one is specified, only the final one takes effect.

-H

if a command line argument is a symbolic link to a directory, traverse it

-L

traverse every symbolic link to a directory encountered

-P

do not traverse any symbolic links (default)

--help

display this help and exit

--version

output version information and exit

Owner is unchanged if missing. Group is unchanged if missing, but changed to login group if implied by a `:' following a symbolic OWNER. OWNER and GROUP may be numeric as well as symbolic.

chown root /u

Change the owner of /u to "root".

chown root:staff /u

Likewise, but also change its group to "staff".

chown -hR root /u

Change the owner of /u and subfiles to "root".

info chown

should give you access to the complete manual.