[SUMMARY] chowning files owned by you...

Kambiz Aghaiepour (kambiz@tcsi.com)
Wed, 26 Mar 1997 23:12:00 -0500

Thanks to:

Amanul Haque <ahaque@psa.pencom.com>

To allow for "chown" command to allow regular users to give away file
ownership, you need to set the following in /etc/system :

set rstchown=0

Note that this setting needs to be set in both the server and the
client. And if the server is not a solaris machine, there needs to be a
similar facility.

I found the following document on sunsolve:

Document ID: 1201

SYNOPSIS: File owner and group under POSIX environments

SYMPTOMS:

The owner of a file cannot change ownership to anyone else.

DETAIL DESCRIPTION:

An error indication occurs while trying to give away a file indicating
current ownership or groupness. The shell invocation "chown .. .."
will print "not owner". A library function usage may fail for either
owner or group This situation has been historically true in BSD based
systems only "root" can change file ownership. System V based systems
only required current ownership.

SOLUTION SUMMARY:

The POSIX standard allows for either the System V (current owner) or BSD
(root only) characteristic to be configured. The token
_POSIX_CHOWN_RESTRICTED is used to indicate BSD behavior. Configuration
of either behavior is controlled by "rstchown" kernel general
parameter.

The default state is 1 (BSD behavior). The /etc/system file is where
the configuration may be set. The format of the file entry is:

set rstchown=0

The system must be rebooted to reconfigure the kernel to recognize any
of the changed parameters.

References:
Stevens, W. Richard, 1992 Advanced Programming in the UNIX
Environment, Addison-Wesley, Reading, PA
ISBN 0-201-56317-7
Sunsoft, 1993, SunOS Administering Security, Performance,
and Accounting for x86