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# Change ownership (chown) on a symbolic link
- URL: https://www.bagz.fr/change-ownership-chown-on-a-symbolic-link/
- Published: 2017-06-14T08:00:25.000Z
- Updated: 2017-06-14T08:00:25.000Z
- Author: bgazui
- Tags: Linux, #Migrated-1790668826633, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-09-29 08:00

You already probably noticed that if you want to update the ownership of a symbolic link on any UNIX system, a simple **chown** won't do the job.

Indeed, let's suppose you have this:

8 lrwxr-xr-x 1 user1 group1 4 Jun 13 23:46 link -> test   
8 -rw-r--r-- 1 user1 group1 6 Jun 13 23:54 test  

If you're doing a simple **chown**:

chown user2:group2 link  

You can see that it changes the ownership on the target file and not on the symbolic link:

8 lrwxr-xr-x 1 user1 group1 4 Jun 13 23:46 link -> test   
8 -rw-r--r-- 1 user2 group2 6 Jun 13 23:54 test  

If you want to update the symbolic link, you need to use the **\-h** or **\--no-dereference** option to apply the changes on the symbolic link and not on the target:

chown -h user2:group2 link  

Then, you can see that it's now updated:

8 lrwxr-xr-x 1 user2 group2 4 Jun 13 23:46 link -> test   
8 -rw-r--r-- 1 user2 group2 6 Jun 13 23:54 test