Change File Ownership

sunilstha108 · 10-29-2019, 10:41 PM

I understand that to change the file ownership you either have to be a root or a file owner, is there any way for other users to change the file ownership?

scasey · 10-29-2019, 11:52 PM

Welcome to LQ

Quote:

Originally Posted by sunilstha108

I understand that to change the file ownership you either have to be a root or a file owner, is there any way for other users to change the file ownership?

No, and even the file owner can't change the ownership of a file they own to another user.

Play with it. Create a file then try to chown it to another user.
Become the other user, try to chown a file that's not yours to you.

mrmazda · 10-30-2019, 12:14 AM

scasey provided the correct answer, "no", but OP might wish to read http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Permissions and http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Permissions with a focus on "group", which might address a reason why OP asked his question.

DavidMcCann · 10-30-2019, 11:41 AM

If you could do it, that would make file ownership useless — anyone could get at another users data! You have to remember that Linux imitates all the features of Unix, which was written for mainframes, and it's the chief operating system used on servers. That means that privacy on multi-user systems has always been built-in and important.

chrism01 · 10-31-2019, 12:31 AM

Modern *nix means a file owner can't give away ownership (except root ofc), but it wasn't always so

Quote:

In earlier versions of UNIX, all users could run the chown command to change the ownership of a file that they owned to that of any other user on the system. This let them "give away" a file. The feature made sharing files back and forth possible, and allowed a user to turn over project directories to someone else.

continued here http://web.deu.edu.tr/doc/oreily/net...is/ch05_07.htm