Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!bywater!scifi!cpunk.watson.ibm.com!aides.watson.ibm.com!marc.watson.ibm.com!marc
From: marc@marc.watson.ibm.com (Marc Auslander)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.aix
Subject: Re: chown broken in 3.1 ?
Message-ID: <7376@aides.watson.ibm.com>
Date: 6 Sep 90 12:02:01 GMT
References: <384@morpho.UUCP>
Sender: news@aides.watson.ibm.com
Reply-To: marc@marc.watson.ibm.com (Marc Auslander)
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Organization: IBM TJ Watson Research
Lines: 18


In article <384@morpho.UUCP>, larry@morpho.UUCP (Larry Morris) writes:

|> The chown() call now requires that co have root permissions in order to
|> perform the chown.  In my case, although co "owns" the file the chown() 
|> returns EPERM (obvious, but not listed in the man pages).  As usual IBM
|> says tough, it works as documented.  Who cares if it acts like unix?
|> 

What is "unix".  In fact, the chown change was a move from the system V
semantics to BSD semantics.  chown on V3 works as it does on (at least)
BSD and SUN.  The reason is that in a controlled shared user system
it is real trouble if one user can "give" files to another.  The user
who is "given" the file will not be able to find it, let alone rm it,
but he'll pay for the space!

Yes, I'd write an SUID program (with appropriate checks) to do this
application.