This is what I recd from GNU regarding the chown documentation: From: Bob Proulx <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Philip S Tellis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Incomplete chown documentation > The chown man and info pages do not document the facts that only root can > change the ownership of a file, and that the setuid bits on files are > reset when they are chowned. Actually, the GNU chown command does not know if this is the policy of the system or not. It calls the kernel chown command. If the OS allows it then it will change the ownership of the file. Different systems handle this differently. Traditional System V UNIX systems allow anyone to give a file away to other owners. On those systems GNU chown does change the ownership of files. On most modern systems BSD symantics are followed and only root can change the ownership of the file. The problem for documenting this is that GNU chown does not know which it will be running on. This is really an OS policy decision and it is hard to track documentation to be different on different systems. The reason to restrict ownership is mostly threefold. One is that people have used this to avoid quota restrictions. Give the file to someone (like root) with disk quota to spare. Two is that you can deny someone service by using all of their quota. Three is that a user can create files that cannot be removed except by the owner and then change the owner. That puts them into a state that only the superuser can fix. Therefore most systems today have changed to disallow giving file ownership away. But it has not always been that way. Bob -- Sattinger's Law: It works better if you plug it in. To subscribe / unsubscribe goto the site www.ilug-bom.org ., click on the mailing list button and fill the appropriate information and submit. For any other queries contact the ML maintener