How to fix "chown: invalid group:" if the user does not exist on the running system?

I want to fix permissions on another disk with chown. Set the permissions to a user which does not exist on the system which is currently running.

Does that work without adding the user?

1 Answer

Use the numerical UID/GID instead of the user/group name.

You can find the UID/GID on the system the disk belongs to by using

 id some_username

or

ls -ln some_file

where some_file is a file that belongs to user you are looking for