Re: chown

[Paul Dwerryhouse <paul@dwerryhouse.com.au>]

On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 07:19:18AM -0500, Kent West wrote:
> I've been unable to find this in the info page for chown. Odd that it's
> not documented in the "official" documentation (as I understand it). I
> wonder how we're supposed to know this (assuming Paul's not always there
> to tell us ;-)  ).

Look it up in Wikipedia! ;) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chown]

It often helps to look at the documentation for system calls; if I look at
the man page for the chown system call -  man 2 chown  - which the chown
program will call at some point during its execution, it says: "Only a
privileged process (Linux: one with the CAP_CHOWN capability) may change
the owner of a file."

I'll confess to not knowing anything about capabilities, however. In this
case I'll assume that only processes with an effective uid of 0 have
this capability. 

Cheers,

Paul

-- 
Paul Dwerryhouse				| PGP Key ID: 0x6B91B584
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