permission denied when renaming file in linux at /var/www/html

Question

I am very new to linux and am using putty and pscp to move files to a live hosted directory. I would like to rename my recently uploaded dist folder to its actual project name using mv but get a permission denied error. What is the safest and most reasonable way to arrange these files so I can rename them?

lawton@lawtonb:/var/www/html$ ls -la
total 268
drwxr-xr-x 4 root   root     4096 Aug 30 16:42 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root   root     4096 Aug 18 23:05 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 lawton lawton 253276 Aug 27 18:06 bundle.js
drwxr-xr-x 2 root   root     4096 Aug 30 16:42 dist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root   root       17 Aug 18 23:24 info.php
drwxr-xr-x 2 root   root     4096 Aug 27 18:59 react-youtube

lawton@lawtonb:/var/www/html$ mv dist BTC_Sorter
mv: cannot move 'dist' to 'BTC_Sorter': Permission denied

Answer 1

You are not the owner of the file, you need execute the command with sudo

sudo mv src dest

Answer 2

If this is a one-time rename, your best course of action would be to run mv with sudo, like this:

sudo mv dist BTC_Sorter

If, however, you'd like to have permissions for your user or group, you should do some reading about chown (The link belongs to the Arch Linux wiki, but should be useful regardless of your distro).

In your particular case, the directory dist is owned both by the user and the group root, hence why you'd need to use sudo, chown or simply the root account.