How to own a folder in ubuntu?

So I love Foobar2000 for Windows and since I’ve started using Linux more I wanted to see if it was available for Linux… well it’s not… at least officially. There is a version u can get that runs through wine and it works except I can’t open any music files because it says access denied. I tried to set myself as the owner of my music folder using chown in the terminal but it doesn’t work. Every time I check the folders owner it says root. By the way the drive my music is on is not the same one as where Linux/ubuntu is installed and it’s an NTFS partition so I can use it with Windows.

This is the command I’ve been trying to use: sudo chown -R dylan:dylan /mnt/C05031C35031C0C8/Music

Do I need to run wine/foobar as root? Or do I need to own the folder? I’m new to Linux and still trying to figure things out.

NTFS is not unix permission/owner aware. It just displays root as that is the default user. Your regular user should have full read/write access regardless of the owner.

NEVER run something as root unless you absolutely have too. Running programs as root allows the program to have complete control of the system and can pose a HUGE security risk. There is pretty much nothing it cant do to your system.


I would suggest trying to copy the music into your home folder and seeing if it can see it there. Wine isnt perfect so you might have to abandon foobar2000 for some other alternative.

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It may need to be mounted with the correct permissions first.

So basically if the drive was a different filesystem like ext4 it would work but just not with NTFS?

NFTS does work, you just haven’t mounted it with the right permissions, you need to set the uid, gid, and mask (if you want) when you mount it

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I’d have said chown recursively but I guess that doesn’t work. Huh.