chown to nobody Invalid Argument?

[Andrey Shinkarev]

root@uz00152p:/ccip_fdm_share/FDMPROD> ls -la
total 0
drwxrwxrwx 4 root root 96 Jan 28 00:45 .
drwxrwxrwx 5 root root 96 Nov 8 19:43 ..
drwxrwxrwx 7 fteuser fteuser 96 Jan 27 08:36 ABTFDMPROD
drwxr-xr-x 2 root sys 96 Jan 28 00:26 x
root@uz00152p:/ccip_fdm_share/FDMPROD>
root@uz00152p:/ccip_fdm_share/FDMPROD> whoami
root
root@uz00152p:/ccip_fdm_share/FDMPROD> chown nobody
root@uz00152p:/ccip_fdm_share/FDMPROD> chown nobody:nogroup ABTFDMPROD
ABTFDMPROD: Invalid argument

Any help appreciated. 

The app is crappy. The design is bad. Discussion on those topics are not necessary

Have to do it. 

I have seen a couple of threads on the topic, but could not find any solution as yet. 

[Bill Hassell]

nobody and nogroup are specialized entries with a numeric value of -2. This is an invalid value for file and directory ownership. That is the reason for the invalid argument. It sounds like a novice DBA or sysadmin thought this would be a good idea but for VxFS or HFS filesystems on HP-UX, it is an invalid ownership. Note that -2 (noody and nogroup) have a special meaning for NFS, but are not used to assign actual ownership.

[Dennis Handly]

>Note that -2 (nobody and nogroup) have a special meaning for NFS, but are not used to assign actual ownership.

Yes they are special to NFS.  And somehow NFS is able to assign those values to ownership.

I think I tried the chown experiment once too.