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CHOWN(2)                      System Calls Manual                     CHOWN(2)

NAME
       chown, fchown - change owner and group of a file

SYNOPSIS
       int chown(const char *path, int owner, int group)

DESCRIPTION
       The  file  that  is  named  by  path has its owner and group changed as
       specified.  Only the super-user may  change  the  owner  of  the  file,
       because  if users were able to give files away, they could defeat file-
       space accounting procedures.  The owner of  the  file  may  change  the
       group to a group of which he is a member.

       On  some systems, chown clears the set-user-id and set-group-id bits on
       the file to prevent accidental creation of set-user-id and set-group-id
       programs.

RETURN VALUE
       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 will fail and the file will be unchanged if:

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

       [ENAMETOOLONG] The path name exceeds 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.

SEE ALSO
       chown(8), chgrp(1), chmod(2).

4th Berkeley Distribution        May 22, 1986                         CHOWN(2)

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ERRORS | SEE ALSO