NAME

chown, lchown, fchown — change owner and group of a file

LIBRARY

Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS

#include <unistd.h>

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

int
lchown(const char *path, uid_t owner, gid_t group);

int
fchown(int fd, uid_t owner, gid_t group);

DESCRIPTION

The owner ID and group ID of the file named by path or referenced by fd is changed as specified by the arguments owner and group. The owner of a file may change the group to a group of which he or she is a member, but the change owner capability is restricted to the super-user.

When called to change the owner of a file, chown(), lchown() and fchown() clear the set-user-id (S_ISUID) bit on the file. When a called to change the group of a file, chown(), lchown() and fchown() clear the set-group-id (S_ISGID) bit on the file. These actions are taken to prevent accidental or mischievous creation of set-user-id and set-group-id programs.

lchown() is like chown() except in the case where the named file is a symbolic link, in which case lchown() changes the owner and group of the link, while chown() changes the owner and group of the file the link references.

fchown() is particularly useful when used in conjunction with the file locking primitives (see flock(2)).

One of the owner or group id's may be left unchanged by specifying it as (uid_t)-1 or (gid_t)-1 respectively.

RETURN VALUES

Zero is returned if the operation was successful; -1 is returned if an error occurs, with a more specific error code being placed in the global variable errno.

ERRORS

chown() and lchown() will fail and the file will be unchanged if:

[ENOTDIR]

A component of the path prefix is not a directory.

[ENAMETOOLONG]

A component of a pathname exceeded {NAME_MAX} characters, or an entire path name exceeded {PATH_MAX} characters.

[ENOENT]

The named file does not exist.

[EACCES]

Search permission is denied for a component of the path prefix.

[ELOOP]

Too many symbolic links were encountered in translating the pathname.

[EPERM]

The effective user ID is not the super-user.

[EROFS]

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

[EFAULT]

path points outside the process's allocated address space.

[EIO]

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

fchown() will fail if:

[EBADF]

fd does not refer to a valid descriptor.

[EINVAL]

fd refers to a socket, not a file.

[EPERM]

The effective user ID is not the super-user.

[EROFS]

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

[EIO]

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

SEE ALSO

chgrp(1), chmod(2), flock(2), symlink(7), chown(8)

STANDARDS

The chown() function deviates from the semantics defined in IEEE Std 1003.1-1990 (“POSIX.1”), which specifies that, unless the caller is the super-user, both the set-user-id and set-group-id bits on a file shall be cleared, regardless of the file attribute changed. The lchown() and fchown() functions, as defined by X/Open Portability Guide Issue 4, Version 2 (“XPG4.2”), provide the same semantics.

To retain conformance to these standards, compatibility interfaces are provided by the POSIX Compatibility Library (libposix, -lposix) as follows:

• The chown() function conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-1990 (“POSIX.1”) and X/Open Portability Guide Issue 4, Version 2 (“XPG4.2”).
• The lchown() and fchown() functions conform to X/Open Portability Guide Issue 4, Version 2 (“XPG4.2”).

HISTORY

The fchown() function call appeared in 4.2BSD.

The chown() and fchown() functions were changed to follow symbolic links in 4.4BSD. The lchown() function call appeared in NetBSD 1.3.