Comment 63 for bug 1522675

The command is lowercase “chown”, without the “(1)”. The general syntax would be “chown <user name> <file or directory>”. You'll normally need superuser privileges to change owners on system files and directories, activated by adding the command “sudo” before the “chown” (separated by a space).

The “(1)” refers to which section in the manual pages, or “manpages”, the command is described in. A common way to get help on a command is to run “man <command_name>”; for instance, you can execute “man chown” to get the manpage on the chown command. (To exit, type the letter q; more info here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/man) The manual pages are divided into numbered sections by categories. Occasionally, there is more than one manpage with the same name, and the section number has to be included in the “man” command to indicate which is desired (for instance, “man 1 printf” gives the page on the shell command “printf”, but “man 3 printf” gives the page on the “printf” library call for C programming).

You can get a manpage on “man” itself with “man man” (or just read it online here: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man1/man.1.html). Under “DESCRIPTION”, there's a list of the manpage sections and their numbers, if you're curious.