On Saturday 07 Jun 2003 6:45 pm, Greg Meyer wrote: > On Saturday 07 June 2003 01:12 pm, Kristjan wrote: > > Hi > > > > It must be a simple thing but still > > > > How can I make so that users can > > change the ownership of files that are resided in their own home > > directory and that are not owned by them > > > > Currently an user who issues 'chown' command to the file that is not > > owned by him only gets that operation is not permitted > > You're right, interesting. I know that a user cannot create a file in a > user directory other than their own unless you have some group thing set > up. > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] /home/greg] > $ touch testfile > touch: cannot touch `testfile': Permission denied > > > I also know that a user can manipulate a file in their own home directory > even without ownership. In other words, if a file owned by root exists in > my home, I can delete it. > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~] $ ls -l testfile > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 7 13:42 testfile > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~] $ rm testfile > rm: remove write-protected regular empty file `testfile'? y > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~] $ ls testfile > ls: testfile: No such file or directory > > Anybody know the answer to this?
Generally, you only need write access to the directory for any changes that are stored in the directory tables. So you can rename and delete files that you cannot write to. There was a workaround that you could do in 1980s Unices in that /etc was owned by "Engineer", so if you lost the root password you could just mv the entire passwd file and create a new one. (Oops!) Since the owner and group are stored in the same tables I would expect that changing them would be possible. >From playing around here it would seem that you cannot chgrp to or from a group that you are not in. By extension it would seem that chown works the same way. Strangely enough the documentation for chown makes no mention of this behavior. -- Richard Urwin
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
