DOCUMENT ID:  1201-02

SYNOPSIS:     File owner and group under POSIX environments

OS RELEASE:   2.1, 2.4, 2.5

PRODUCT:      Solaris

KEYWORDS:     POSIX_CHOWN_RESTRICTED chown chgrp file ownership


SYMPTOMS:

The owner of a file cannot change ownership to anyone else.


DESCRIPTION:

An error indication occurs while trying to give away a file indicating
current ownership or groupness.  The shell invocation "chown ..  .."
will print "not owner".  A library function usage may fail for either
owner or group This situation has been historically true in BSD based
systems only "root" can change file ownership.  System V based systems
only required current ownership. 


SOLUTION:

The POSIX standard allows for either the System V (current owner) or BSD
(root only) characteristic to be configured.  The token
_POSIX_CHOWN_RESTRICTED is used to indicate BSD behavior.  Configuration
of either behavior is controlled by "rstchown" kernel general parameter. 
The default state is 1 (BSD behavior).  The /etc/system file is where
the configuration may be set.  The format of the file entry is:

set rstchown=0

The system must be rebooted to reconfigure the kernel to recognize any
of the changed parameters. 

References:
Stevens, W. Richard, 1992 Advanced Programming in the UNIX
         Environment, Addison-Wesley, Reading, PA
         ISBN 0-201-56317-7
Sunsoft, 1993, SunOS Administering Security, Performance,
         and Accounting for x86


DATE APPROVED: 09/18/95