Most systems will not let you change the owner of a file unless you are a SuperUser.

This at least used to be true of one major branch of the Unix family tree (I think the SysV side) but not true of the other (I think Berkeley).

In any case, on several Unix systems, it at least used to be possible to give your own files away. That is, you could chown files that you owned such that they would then belong to someone else.

To prevent this from being a huge problem, there were (of course) several restrictions. You couldn't chown files in partitions with quotas active. chowning a file removes the set-UID and set-GID bits (true even if you a root, no?). etc.

                - tye

In reply to Re^2: maintaining owner id (depends) by tye
in thread maintaining owner id by Anonymous Monk

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