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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!news.netspace.net.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!news.sprintlink.net!news-stk-3.sprintlink.net!news.cirrus.com!usenet From: Clint Wolff <clint_w@colorado.cirrus.com> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Why chown(2) is privileged? Date: Mon, 11 Nov 1996 14:46:23 -0700 Organization: Cirrus Logic, Inc. Lines: 25 Message-ID: <32879EAF.41C67EA6@colorado.cirrus.com> References: <CANDY.96Oct24222129@xxx.fct.kgc.co.jp> <w7iv7cjv2t.fsf@mud.imperium.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: longs.colorado.cirrus.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0Gold (X11; I; SunOS 4.1.3_U1 sun4m) Mark Lehrer wrote: ; ; candy@fct.kgc.co.jp (Toshihiro Kanda) writes: ; ; > Hello. Chown(2) fails if non super-user try to change the owner ; > uid of his/her files. Why does BSD disallow non super-user to ; > transfer ownership of files to the others? ; ; Ok, i figured it out - in order for non-root users to use this ; command, this would have to be a setuid root program... so it ; is probably not worth the security risk; especially with a ; program like chown!! Actually, the main reason for this is to prevent screwing up file system quotas. If you could chown a few of your big files to someone else, your disk usage would go way down and theirs would go way up. In the ancient versions of BSD (early eighties), you could chown a file to someone else, but couldn't chown it back to yourself. clint -- Underscores added to return address to defeat advertising engines. clintw@colorado.cirrus.com