Subject: bug#6913: change file ownership/permissions from root to user fail even with success confirmation

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:26:48 -0600

On 08/25/2010 11:23 AM, Philipp Thomas wrote:
> * John McMillan ([email-masked]) [20100825 19:06]:
>
>> to which I receive the following confirmation -
>> changed ownership of `/media/C:/Documents and Settings/John/My
>> Documents/Word/John/Augustine.doc' to john:john
>
> Looks like this is a DOS/WIN partition, i.e. vfat or ntfs. These file
> systems don't know of unix style access rights.  Owning user are group are
> set via mount options (see 'man 8 mount') and can't be changed by chown.
> This is a shortcoming of the file system, not of chown.

Additionally, if the file system claims that chown() succeeded when it 
in fact did nothing, then that would be a bug in the file system driver, 
to be fixed by the kernel folks (that is, it is not coreutils' job to 
detect whether the chown() syscall has a buggy return value for your 
file system).

-- 
Eric Blake   [email-masked]    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org