By belakey
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?
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.
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.
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.
Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.
Full documentation for every DigitalOcean product.
The Wave has everything you need to know about building a business, from raising funding to marketing your product.
Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

From GPU-powered inference and Kubernetes to managed databases and storage, get everything you need to build, scale, and deploy intelligent applications.
