How to restore group ownership

[osiris_ro]

Hi.

Is there a way to restore the group ownership value to a previous state?

What I did is I tried to change the group owning a folder but I targeted the wrong folder while doing so. Now I would like to correct the situation, but I don't know what group of users was owning the folder before the change. Is there any way I could, at least find out what group was owning the folder previous to the change?

[AlexK]

By default, the group the folder belongs to is the same group that the owner belongs to.

You can't see the prior owner of a file or folder. But you can try using chmod 640 <folder name> and it will assign RW permissions to owner, R permission to group and block everyone else from viewing it.

the numbers are as follows:
7 = Read Write Exec
6 = Read Write
4 = Read
0 = Block

when chmodding, the 1st number is for the owner's rights. 2nd is for group rights and 3rd is for other's rights.

[fingal]

... and there's the chown command for changing group ownership. For eg., chown fingal /fingal/myfile

I've not really used it much myself though.