The command chown, an abbreviation of change owner, is used on Unix-like systems to change the owner of file system files, directories. Unprivileged (regular) users who wish to change the group membership of a file that they own may use chgrp.
The ownership of any file in the system may only be altered by a super-user. A user cannot give away ownership of a file, even when the user owns it. Similarly, only a member of a group can change a file's group ID to that group
References
Chown Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA