Question

How do I revert the group ownership of www-data to default?

I entered sudo usermod -g www-data ftpuser

How do I return it to the default values? Is it owned by root? If so it would be:

sudo usermod -g www-data root?

How do i check the ownership of www-data?

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Matthew Delfino • January 11, 2020
Accepted Answer

Groups don’t have owners.

Your first command, sudo usermod -g www-data ftpuser made ftpuser’s default group into www-data. If you ran sudo usermod -g www-data root, you would, in kind, make the root user’s group be www-data. That’s not a good idea.

Groups do not have owners. Files and directories (folders) have owners. Users belong to groups, groups have members and every user has a default group, which is the group that gets applied to the POSIX permissions of any files or directories that user makes.

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belakey • January 11, 2020

@MatthewDelfino

Ok, i see where i went wrong.

Now I did:

sudo usermod -g root root

would make root back into the default group.

id root

uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)

Thanks for the explanation.

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