Every file has an owner which is one of the registered user names
defined on the system. Each file also has a group which is one of
the defined groups. The file owner can often be useful for showing you
who edited the file (especially when you edit with GNU Emacs), but its
main purpose is for access control.
The file owner and group play a role in determining access because the
file has one set of access permission bits for the owner, another set
that applies to users who belong to the file's group, and a third set of
bits that applies to everyone else. See Access Permission, for the
details of how access is decided based on this data.
When a file is created, its owner is set to the effective user ID of the
process that creates it (see Process Persona). The file's group ID
may be set to either the effective group ID of the process, or the group
ID of the directory that contains the file, depending on the system
where the file is stored. When you access a remote file system, it
behaves according to its own rules, not according to the system your
program is running on. Thus, your program must be prepared to encounter
either kind of behavior no matter what kind of system you run it on.
You can change the owner and/or group owner of an existing file using
the chown function. This is the primitive for the chown
and chgrp shell commands.
The prototype for this function is declared in unistd.h.
The chown function changes the owner of the file filename to
owner, and its group owner to group.
Changing the owner of the file on certain systems clears the set-user-ID
and set-group-ID permission bits. (This is because those bits may not
be appropriate for the new owner.) Other file permission bits are not
changed.
The return value is 0 on success and -1 on failure.
In addition to the usual file name errors (see File Name Errors),
the following errno error conditions are defined for this function:
EPERM
This process lacks permission to make the requested change.
Only privileged users or the file's owner can change the file's group.
On most file systems, only privileged users can change the file owner;
some file systems allow you to change the owner if you are currently the
owner. When you access a remote file system, the behavior you encounter
is determined by the system that actually holds the file, not by the
system your program is running on.
See Options for Files, for information about the
_POSIX_CHOWN_RESTRICTED macro.
EROFS
The file is on a read-only file system.
— Function: int fchown (int filedes, int owner, int group)
This is like chown, except that it changes the owner of the open
file with descriptor filedes.
The return value from fchown is 0 on success and -1
on failure. The following errno error codes are defined for this
function:
EBADF
The filedes argument is not a valid file descriptor.
EINVAL
The filedes argument corresponds to a pipe or socket, not an ordinary
file.
EPERM
This process lacks permission to make the requested change. For details
see chmod above.
EROFS
The file resides on a read-only file system.
Published under the terms of the GNU General Public License
