Setting $> seems to work fine on my AIX box (5.2, perl 5.8.8) if I set it to -2 or 4294967294. If I then touch a file it is owned by "nobody" in either case. The comparison fails for -2, but 4294967294 works fine. It looks like the $> variable is getting converted to an unsigned value, which would make sense since the underlying data type uid_t is unsigned.

FWIW, I've had strange problems with setting uid/etc with variables in AIX, at least in the past. You may want to look at the various POSIX routines for this. AIX just loves to be different sometimes...

In reply to Re: EUID cannot be set by bluto
in thread EUID cannot be set by 0xbeef

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