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Section: -
Language: en-US (English)|
Workaround:

Description: Chapter 6, the section "Managing File System Permissions from the
Command Line" intentionally shows how to use chown only with the colon syntax. That is

chown user:group filename

On purpose, it does not discuss the obsolete (but very commonly known) syntax

chown user.group filename

Unfortunately, it also doesn't discuss why we don't include that syntax. It's obsolete as discussed in info coreutils chown, and there's a good reason for this. The username enoch.root is a valid user name; the user enoch:root is not. What the chown command should do when confronted with chown enoch.root filename on a system where there's an enoch user, a root group, and an enoch.root user is ambiguous. The chown enoch:root filename command is not.

Note that I'm certain that we have labs all through the Red Hat training material that use the . syntax with chown.