FreeBSD Man Pages

chown(2)

NAME

     chown, fchown, lchown -- 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
     fchown(int fd, uid_t owner, gid_t group);

     int
     lchown(const char *path, 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.

     The chown() system call clears the set-user-id and set-group-id bits on
     the file to prevent accidental or mischievous creation of set-user-id and
     set-group-id programs if not executed by the super-user.  The chown()
     system call follows symbolic links to operate on the target of the link
     rather than the link itself.

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

     The lchown() system call is similar to chown() but does not follow sym-
     bolic links.

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

RETURN VALUES

     Upon successful completion, the value 0 is returned; otherwise the
     value -1 is returned and the global variable errno is set to indicate the
     error.

ERRORS

     The 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 255 characters, or
			an entire path name exceeded 1023 characters.

     [ENOENT]		The named file does not exist.

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

			cated address space.

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

     The fchown() system call will fail if:

     [EBADF]		The fd argument does not refer to a valid descriptor.

     [EINVAL]		The fd argument 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), chown(8)

STANDARDS

     The chown() system call is expected to conform to ISO/IEC 9945-1:1990
     (``POSIX.1'').

HISTORY

     The chown() function appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX.  The fchown() sys-
     tem call appeared in 4.2BSD.

     The chown() system call was changed to follow symbolic links in 4.4BSD.
     The lchown() system call was added in FreeBSD 3.0 to compensate for the
     loss of functionality.

FreeBSD 5.4			April 19, 1994			   FreeBSD 5.4

SPONSORED LINKS