Help with changing ownership of Symbolic Links

JoeDo · 04-08-2009, 02:49 PM

Hi,

I am in the process of building a RHEL 5.2 server for Oracle RAC. I changed ownership of the /dev/mapper partitions as noted below:
# chown oracle /dev/mapper/36006016068932300669afe00d7e8dd11

I tried doing the same with the symbolic links but when I ran "ls -l" I still see that root is the owner of the symbolic links.

Here is an example of what I ran:
# chown oracle /var/oracle/disk/asm_data1

Any input would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Joe

raskin · 04-08-2009, 03:23 PM

1) Quick glance through "man chown" shows -h switch. So "chown -h oracle /var/oracle/disk/asm_data1"
2) Most operations on symlinks ignore ownership anyway. Ownership of the linked objects is what counts - so chown changes ownership of link target by default.

sundialsvcs · 04-08-2009, 03:28 PM

As far as I know, a symbolic link does not have "permissions" of its own: it is literally a tiny-file which contains the name of another file. It doesn't confer any different access-privileges; it is just a tiny envelope with a filename inside.