Linux – Using dot (.) as delimiter to specify group in chown

chowncommand-line-interfacelinux

I've always done:

chown nimmylebby:admins file

I see that this also works:

chown nimmylebby.admins file

Might seem like a silly question but I'm genuinely curious on how the latter works. It isn't documented in my chown's manpage (GNU coreutils 8.4, 10/10). Is this perhaps a Bash interpretation? Or a deprecated format for the argument?

Best Answer

From the chown(8) manpage on Mac OS X version 10.9:

COMPATIBILITY

Previous versions of the chown utility used the dot (``.'') character to distinguish the group name. This has been changed to be a colon (``:'') character, so that user and group names may contain the dot character.

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