One of the most commonly used Linux system administration tools is chown, which is part of the coreutils package. It is used to change the user and/or group ownership of a given file or directory. Something to be aware of this tool is, it doesn’t change the ownership of symbolic links, as shown below –

root@linubuvma:/tmp# touch test
root@linubuvma:/tmp# ls -l test
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12 Dec 20 08:01 test
root@linubuvma:/tmp# ln -s test sltest
root@linubuvma:/tmp# ls -l sltest
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Dec 20 08:01 sltest -> test
root@linubuvma:/tmp# chown daniel:daniel sltest
root@linubuvma:/tmp# ls -l sltest
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Dec 20 08:01 sltest -> test

The reason this doesn’t work is in the man page for chown – symbolic links named by arguments are silently left unchanged unless -h is used.” By simply running chown on symbolic link without ‘-h’ option, you are changing the ownership of the target. The ‘-h’ option affects symbolic links instead of any referenced file.

root@linubuvma:/tmp# chown -h daniel:daniel sltest

root@linubuvma:/tmp# ls -l sltest
lrwxrwxrwx 1 daniel daniel 4 Dec 20 08:01 sltest -> test

Though not portable, in some distros

 chown -R 

will recursively change the owernship of all files, including symbolic link files and directories. In my case, ‘chown -R /path/to/file’ works for GNU chown which is part of the ‘GNU coreutils 8.21’ package on Ubuntu 14.04.