Howdy Forum,

I cannot change groups or ownership as root, whether su-ing or logged in as root.

I get "changing ownership:...operation not permitted"

I saw another post that indicated this is not permitted on FAT filesystems, however this is on files in my /home and /, which are reiserfs.

What's the deal here? (if you're going to RTFM, please tell me which FM to R -- thanks)

Thanks,
Joel

A few things that might be the problem:

The file is immutable (man chattr)
The filesystem is mounted read only (man fstab) ... tried adding umask=0000 or 0333?
The filesystem has been corrupted (man fsck)
The file is locked by some process (fuser -k /this/is/your/file)
The kernel has something akin to SELinux or capabilities enabled (You'd likely know if this was the case)
The file is mounted with NFS and you are the wrong root... (I do this all the time, lol)

Are you sure this is ReiserFS? NTFS, (v)fat and other legacy FS don't support these kind of file attributes. If nothing here solves your issue let's see an output of ls -la for the file in question, the output of mount, and output of whoami..

Good Luck,
NomadX

can you prove your claims? if you can show us a copy of your terminal commands, and also an ls -l of the relevant file, and a stat of it too. it's possible to make a file immutable (chattr +i filename) where no one, not even root can change a file without first unsetting that bit.

Mr Kewpie, I'll cover your requests on Monday when I'm back in the office.

As of now, I can say (a few details I left out):

I have three hda partitions, one swap, two reiserfs (/ and /home) and one vfat (/windows) -- which is *not* a windows bootable partition, I just meant it to hold data for programs under Wine. Given this configuration, unfortunately none of the scenarios you listed, NomadX, will apply. For example, no NFS, I know the files are not in use (they are statistica data files and scripts used by Stata, not system files). On the other hand, would this happen if I only had one file in the directory tree open (e.g., in XEmacs)?

Also, this is not just one file, this is whole directories. For example, I wanted to change the group of my statistical data directory from "users" to "biostat" anticipating giving other people ssh to my computer. I got "operation not permitted."



I thought this was weird because I didn't get this error when I had slackware installed at home. I could do anything I wanted as root -- even simulate destroying the world. That's what I call a super-user.

Thanks,
Joel

It's a miracle! It worked: I did the regular command as root and it went through this time.

Thanks for your interest
Joel