DOCUMENT ID: 1201-02 SYNOPSIS: File owner and group under POSIX environments OS RELEASE: 2.1, 2.4, 2.5 PRODUCT: Solaris KEYWORDS: POSIX_CHOWN_RESTRICTED chown chgrp file ownership SYMPTOMS: The owner of a file cannot change ownership to anyone else. DESCRIPTION: An error indication occurs while trying to give away a file indicating current ownership or groupness. The shell invocation "chown .. .." will print "not owner". A library function usage may fail for either owner or group This situation has been historically true in BSD based systems only "root" can change file ownership. System V based systems only required current ownership. SOLUTION: The POSIX standard allows for either the System V (current owner) or BSD (root only) characteristic to be configured. The token _POSIX_CHOWN_RESTRICTED is used to indicate BSD behavior. Configuration of either behavior is controlled by "rstchown" kernel general parameter. The default state is 1 (BSD behavior). The /etc/system file is where the configuration may be set. The format of the file entry is: set rstchown=0 The system must be rebooted to reconfigure the kernel to recognize any of the changed parameters. References: Stevens, W. Richard, 1992 Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, Addison-Wesley, Reading, PA ISBN 0-201-56317-7 Sunsoft, 1993, SunOS Administering Security, Performance, and Accounting for x86 DATE APPROVED: 09/18/95