Re: chown

[Bernhard Rosenkraenzer <bero redhat de>]

On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Stan Isaacs wrote:

>   After looking at both the redhat archives, and freebsd, I guess I'm 
> convinced that chown won't work, by default, for non-root users.  Is there
> any way to change that default on Redhat Linux 6.1?  

It's not a default, it's a concept. Allowing anything else would be VERY
stupid, as it would allow stuff like

cat >evil.sh <<EOF
#!/bin/sh
rm -rf ~someone/* ~someone/.*
EOF
chmod 4755 evil.sh
chown someone evil.sh
./evil.sh

>   Shouldn't the man pages for chown talk about this?  Again, how can I
> keep telling my students to read the man pages, if they don't even
> give facts like who can execute a command?  In fact, why isn't the command
> in /usr/sbin (or /sbin?), with the other system commands?

You can do stuff like
chown you.someothergroup file
when you're a member of someothergroup.

LLaP
bero