Which command sets both the owner and the group of report.txt to alice and staff in a single invocation?
LPIC-1 Exam 101-500, objective 104. Devices, Linux filesystems, filesystem hierarchy standard easy
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How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Not correct chgrp alice:staff report.txt
Wrong. chgrp takes a group name only, so it would look for a group literally called 'alice:staff' and fail with 'invalid group'.
Correct chown alice:staff report.txt
Correct. chown accepts owner:group. Omitting the group (chown alice file) changes only the owner; writing chown :staff file changes only the group.
Not correct chmod alice:staff report.txt
Wrong. chmod changes permission bits, not ownership. It cannot parse a user:group argument as a mode.
Not correct newgrp staff report.txt
Wrong. newgrp takes a group name, not a file: it starts a new shell whose primary group is staff, which affects the group ownership of files you create afterwards. It changes nothing about an existing file.
Why
chown user:group changes both at once; chgrp is the group-only shortcut. Only root may give a file away to another user; an ordinary owner can change the group only to a group they belong to. -R applies the change recursively through a directory tree.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- LPI exam objective 104.5
- What it says
- Change file ownership and group ownership with chown and chgrp.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 104 and space the ones you get wrong.
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