Dear all,

I have a chown program problem. I have a directory as below:

drwxrwxr-x 57 ftp software 4096 Mar 11 23:39 software

In side software I have a directory 123 as below:

drwxrwxr-x 2 tommy software 4096 Mar 11 23:39 123

I current account is tommy. And I type chown ftp:software 123, then
output is

chown: changing ownership of `123': Operation not permitted.

I have set tommy and ftp to same software group. Why I cannot execute
this command?

Regards,

Tommy

does it work if you are root?

Yes, I can.

is tommy a member of software?

Yes.

I don't think I can answer your question properly, other than:
isn't this the idea with *nix file permisions?
ie. that you can't change the ownership of a file to another user unless you are root?
(regardless of group membership?)

Yes. I cannot change owner while both user are same group.

yes, I think that is the way it's supposed to be

I don't know how to do it other than execute the command as root

is there a problem chowning with root?

Can you use chown under non root permission ?

yes, but not to alter permissions for another user

you could always sudo or fakeroot the chown command I guess

I am not understand what you mean, sorry !!!

I mean, for example,

user tommy cannot assign permisions for user charlie
ie.
this won't work:
$chown charlie testfile
where testfile is owned by tommy

however:
using the sudo or fakeroot commands, you could allow tommy to perform commands that normally only root could execute
ie.
$sudo chown charlie testfile

to do this you obviously need either sudo or fakeroot installed.

For sudo, for example, to allow charlie to perform root commands, you need to edit /etc/sudoers to include a line something like:
charlie ALL=(ALL) ALL