In the beginning, all chown(1) did was change the owner of a file; if you wanted to change a file's group too, you had to use chgrp(1) as well. This is actually more unusual than I realized before I started to write this entry, because even in V7 Unix the chown(2) system call itself could change both user and group, per the V7 chown(2) manpage . Restricting chown(1) to only changing the owner did make the command itself pretty simple, though.

By the time of 4.1c BSD, chown(1) had become chown(8) , because, per the manual page :

Only the super-user can change owner,
in order to simplify as yet unimplemented accounting procedures.

(The System V line of Unixes would retain an unrestricted chown(2) system call for some time and thus I believe they kept the chown command in section 1, for general commands anyone could use.)

In 4.3 BSD, someone decided that chown(8) might as well let you change the group at the same time, to match the system call. As the manual page covers, they used this syntax:

/etc/chown [ -f -R ] owner[.group] file ...

That is, to chown a file to user cks , group staff , you did ' chown cks.staff file '.

This augmented version of the chown command was picked up by various Unixes that descended from 4.x BSD, although not immediately (like many things from 4.3 BSD, it took a while to propagate around). Sometimes this was the primary version of chown , found in /usr/bin or the like; sometimes this was a compatibility version, in /usr/ucb (Solaris through fairly late, for example). Depending on how you set up your $PATH on such systems, you could wind up using this version of chown and thus get used to having 'user:group' rejected as an error.

Then, when it came time for POSIX to standardize this, someone woke up and created the modern syntax for changing both owner and group at once. As seen in the Single Unix Specification for chown , this is ' chown owner[:group] file ', ie the separator is now a colon. Since POSIX and the SUS normally standardized existing practice (where it actually existed), you might wonder why they changed it. The answer is simple: a colon is not a valid character in a login, while a dot is .

Sure, dots are unusual in Unix logins in most places, but they're legal and they do show up in some environments (and they're legal in group names as well). Colons are outright illegal unless you like explosions, fundamentally because they're the field separator character in /etc/passwd and /etc/group . The SUS manpage actually has an explicit discussion of this in the RATIONALE section, although it doesn't tell you what it means by 'historical implementations'.

(The SUS manpage also discusses a scenario where using chown and chgrp separately isn't sufficient, and you have to make the change in a single chown() system call .)

PS: Since I think I ran into this dot-versus-colon issue on our old Solaris 10 fileservers , I probably had /usr/ucb before /usr/bin in my $PATH there. I generally prefer UCB versions of things to the stock Solaris versions, but in this case it tripped me up.

PPS: It turns out the GNU chown accepts the dot form as well provided that it's unambiguous, although this is covered only in the chown info file , and is not mentioned in the normal manpage.