Adding groups in CLI

[timothyhewell]

What is the best command for adding groups to a file?

[hazel]

Are you talking about changing the group ownership of the file? You can do it with either chown or chgrp but you need root access to use chown; chgrp was invented so that ordinary users could change group ownership.

A file can be owned by only one group at a time. If you just want to widen access to the file, it's best to change its permissions with chmod to make it world-readable.

[Cabhan]

If you want to change the controlling group of a file, then hazel is 100% correct.

If you are trying to add groups to the system, or change who is a member of what groups, you can use the groupadd and gpasswd commands.