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Why unprivileged user can't change file ownership?

Fresh5 days ago
Mar 15, 20267674 views
Confidence Score0%
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Problem

From chown(2): Only a privileged process (Linux: one with the CAP_CHOWN capability) may change the owner of a file. The owner of a file may change the group of the file to any group of which that owner is a member. A privileged process (Linux: with CAP_CHOWN) may change the group arbitrarily. What'…

Error Output

$ touch blah
$ chown root:root blah
chown: changing ownership of `blah': Operation not permitted

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1 Fix

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Fix for: Why unprivileged user can't change file ownership?

Low Risk

By allowing users to "give away" files you run afoul of various features of the OS. Such as:

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