Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 8 Jul 1996 10:38:31 +0300 (EET DST) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: How does chown(2) works with symlinks? |
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> Which file gets changed when a call to chown(2) is done on a symlink? > The man page gives the impression that it would follow the symlink and > change the owner of the file pointed by the symlink. Still, if a used > chown on a symlink now, it will only change the symlink. Was there a > change to the way it works?
If you want to change the owner of the file it points to, use:
fd = open(...); fchown(fd,..);
which should always work the way you expect. If you use "chown()" on the pathname it will change the synlink itself (if you think about it, that is actually the reasonable behaviour: otherwise you could never change the owner of the symlink).
I think some older versions of linux actually changed the file that the symlink pointed to, and it got changed at one point. I could be mistaken, though,
Linus
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