How to change file owner in AIX?

Question

How can I change a owner of a file in AIX? I created a file using my personal account and then I tried to change user for this file:

chown rootuser myfile.csv
chown: myfile.csv: Operation not permitted.

Then I changed to root user

sudo /usr/bin/su - rootuser

and tried to change the owner of this file

chown rootuser myfile.csv
chown: myfile.csv: Not owner

How can I change the owner of this file?

Solution

You need to run chown as root.

Root means root: the user with user ID 0. If this rootuser is a user who has the permission to run commands as root by using sudo, that's not good enough. What rootuser can do is to run sudo chown … — the chown command must be run by root, the rootuser itself has no particular privileges.

Comments

[Jeff Hewitt]

You are not allowed to change the ownership of any file you own to another user: this opens up a can of worms in terms of security. As for root not being able to do that, this is really strange. By any chance, are you in a corporate environment where you authenticate with something like NIS/LDAP? Is this file local to your box or is it from a network-shared partition? What is the file Bill_Item_Tag_data.csv? Is myfile.csv a symbolic link?

[dchirikov]

Could you add some outputs to your question? <pre>id rootuser</pre> and <pre>lsuser rootuser</pre>.

[jrara]

@JosephR I edited my question.

[Erik Aronesty]

try sudo chown rootuser myfile.csv

[jrara]

Ok, I guess my rootuser is not really a root. Thanks a lot.