...Even if they belong to me?
works. Why not as normal user? Pipes are fine, it's character and block specials that are problematic.

(To explain a bit: I'm copying the guts of iso files into ordinary directories for analysis, so I don't have to mount them everytime I need to take a peek, and I run into this on every dev directory, and also some lib dirs that have char nodes 'null', and a few other odd places. So the copy operation has to be done as root even though everything is owned by me as regular user.)

This is not urgent or anything, just puzzling.

I guess if an ordinary user could delete your disk node you wouldn't be very happy.
There are certain things (& programs) that are the preserve of 'root' to prevent an 'unhappy' user from damaging your system.

Copying a device node requires creating a new one that happens to be the same as the source. Allowing a non-root user to create a device node would be a huge security hole since you could gain access to any device just by creating a device node that gave you the needed permissions. Even if the special case of copying a device node were allowed, that would still be a security issue since that node would give you permissions that the system could not later remove, such as happens with the various device nodes that are owned by the currently logged-in user.

Incidentally, that's why automatically mounted external devices always get the "nodev" option, among other restrictions.

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I'd think the iso has permissions much like any mountable point. The file permissions are there from the build of the iso. You don't own that exactly.

Yeah, they usually come with gibbled perms everywhere. "sudo chown -R me:me *" fixes that issue pretty quick.

That makes sense. I'm not a paranoid individual by nature, so I tend to keep my security somewhere between 'lax' and 'sloppy', kinda like "The key is under the mat."

That also explains why pipes are OK but char and block specials are not.

Thank you very much.