chown(2) — AIX PS/2 1.2.1



CHOWN(2,L)                  AIX Technical Reference                  CHOWN(2,L)



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chown, fchown



PURPOSE

Changes the owner and group IDs of files associated with a path name or with a
file descriptor.

LIBRARY

Standard C Library (libc.a)

SYNTAX


      int chown  (path, owner, group)     int fchown  (fd, owner, group)
      char *path;                         int fd;
      uid_t owner;                        uid_t owner;
      gid_t group;                        gid_t group;



DESCRIPTION

The chown and fchown system calls change the owner ID and/or the group ID of
the file named by the path parameter or of the open file named by the fd
parameter, respectively.  If the named file is a symbolic link, the owner ID
and/or group ID of the symbolic link itself are changed, not those of the file
pointed to by the symbolic link.

The owner and group IDs of the named file are set to the numeric values
contained in the owner and group parameters, respectively.

If either the owner or group parameter has the value (uid_t)-1 or (gid_t)-1,
respectively the corresponding ID in the named file is left unchanged.

A process can change the ownership of a file only if its effective user ID is
the superuser.  The group ID may be changed if the effective user ID of the
process is superuser or matches the file's owner ID.  In the latter case, the
group ID may only be changed to the value of the process's effective group ID
or a value in the process's concurrent group list.

RETURN VALUE

Upon successful completion, a value of 0 is returned.  If the chown or fchown
system call fails, a value of -1 is returned, and errno is set to indicate the
error.

ERROR CONDITIONS




Processed November 7, 1990        CHOWN(2,L)                                  1



CHOWN(2,L)                  AIX Technical Reference                  CHOWN(2,L)



The chown system call fails and the owner ID and the group ID of the named file
remain unchanged if one or more of the following are true:

ENOTDIR   A component of the path prefix is not a directory.

ENOENT    The named file does not exist.

EACCES    Search permission is denied on a component of the path prefix.

ENOENT    A symbolic link was named, but the file to which it refers does
          exist. Since chown does not follow a symbolic link when it is the
          last component of the path, this error cannot occur on the last
          component.

EFAULT    The path parameter points to a location outside of the process's
          allocated address space in an NFS virtual file system that has been
          unmounted.

ENAMETOOLONG
          A component of the path parameter exceeded NAME_MAX characters or the
          entire path parameter exceeded PATH_MAX characters.

ENOENT    A hidden directory was named, but no component inside it matched the
          process's current site path list.

ELOOP     A loop of symbolic links was detected.  Since chown does not follow
          symbolic links in the last component of the path, this error cannot
          occur on the last component.

ENOSTORE  The path is a name relative to the working directory, but no site
          which stores this directory is currently up.

EINTR     A signal was caught during the system call.

The fchown system call fails and the owner ID and group ID of the named file
remain unchanged if one or more of the following are true:

EBADF     fd does not refer to a valid file descriptor

EINVAL    fd refers to a socket, not a file.

The chown and fchown system calls fail and the owner ID and group ID of the
named file remain unchanged if one or more of the following are true:

EPERM     The effective user ID does not match the owner of the file and the
          effective user ID is not superuser.

EROFS     The named file resides on a read-only file system.

ESTALE    The process's root or current directory is located





Processed November 7, 1990        CHOWN(2,L)                                  2



CHOWN(2,L)                  AIX Technical Reference                  CHOWN(2,L)



If the Transparent Computing Facility is installed on your system, chown can
also fail if one or more of the following are true:

ESITEDN1  The specified file cannot be accessed because a site went down.

ESITEDN2  The operation was terminated because a site failed.

ENOSTORE  The file specified by fd or a component of path is replicated but is
          not stored on any site which is currently up.

EROFS     Write access is requested  for a file on a replicated file system in
          which the primary copy is unavailable.

EIO       An I/O error occurred while reading from or writing to the file
          system.

RELATED INFORMATION

In this book:  "chmod, fchmod,"  "statx, fstatx, stat, fstat, fullstat,
ffullstat, lstat," and "stat.h."

The chown command in AIX Operating System Commands Reference.

































Processed November 7, 1990        CHOWN(2,L)                                  3

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