The concept of owner and groups for files is fundamental to Linux. Every file is associated with an owner and a group. We issued the chown command with the ‘-R’ option to change both the owner and group. In my particular case I’m logged in as root but am unable to change the owner of the file from ‘root’ to ‘tomcat’. I’ve tried several of the examples above but none are taking and no error messaging appears either. ID of the new group, which, in turn, is followed by a space and then by the names of the target files, press "Apply Permissions to Enclosed Files" to apply the changes recursively. That directory may not be there. The command will work only when the directory present. You can now select the user or group that you would like to be the "Owner" of the folder as well as the permissions you would like to grant them. Finally, directories and/or links.