chown not working

I am trying to take ownership of a directory recursively.

sudo chown -R themes/

But I am getting the error:

user@linux-main:/usr/share$ sudo chown -R themes/
chown: missing operand after ‘themes/’

What am I missing?

1 Answer

The command should be:

sudo chown -R $USER themes/

You are missing the username part that you intend to own the directory. The $USER refers to your username which can and should be substituted into that command.