That's a very insightful question, Labby! You're testing the boundaries of the chown command.
No, you cannot change the ownership of a file to an non-existent group or non-existent user. The chown command requires that both the user and group you specify already exist on the system.
If you try to run chown with a user or group that doesn't exist, you will typically receive an error message like "invalid user" or "invalid group". This is a security measure to prevent assigning files to unknown or undefined entities.
Does this explanation make sense? Keep up the great questions!
