chown

See the current Perl documentation for chown.

Here is our local, out-dated (pre-5.6) version:

chown - change the owership on a list of files

chown LIST

Changes the owner (and group) of a list of files. The first two elements of the list must be the NUMERICAL uid and gid, in that order. Returns the number of files successfully changed.

    $cnt = chown $uid, $gid, 'foo', 'bar';
    chown $uid, $gid, @filenames;

Here's an example that looks up nonnumeric uids in the passwd file:

    print "User: ";
    chop($user = <STDIN>);
    print "Files: ";
    chop($pattern = <STDIN>);

    ($login,$pass,$uid,$gid) = getpwnam($user)
        or die "$user not in passwd file";

    @ary = glob($pattern);      # expand filenames
    chown $uid, $gid, @ary;

On most systems, you are not allowed to change the ownership of the file unless you're the superuser, although you should be able to change the group to any of your secondary groups. On insecure systems, these restrictions may be relaxed, but this is not a portable assumption.