chgrp: Not owner

[Ira Manalac]

I have a filesystem /dbs1 owned by root and group is dba. When I issued "chgrp -R sys /dbs1", it returned "Not owner". I've verified the permission for /usr/bin/chgrp is -r-xr-xr-x. What could have been wrong?

[Thierry Poels_1]

hi,
to chgrp a file you need to be the owner of the file or root.
If you didn't execute the chgrp as root, there is probably a file in the /dbs1 tree that does not belong to you.
If you DID execute the chgrp as root, then there's possibly a filesystem NFS-mounted from another system.
regards,
Thierry.

[Ira Manalac]

Hi Thierry,

Thanks for the very speedy response. Anyways, I did execute chgrp as root and I've verified thatthere are no NFS-mounted filesystem.

Please advise. Thanks again.

Ira

[Thierry Poels_1]

hmmmmz :(
can identify exactly where the problem occurs?
try:
chgrp sys /dbs1 (for the directory itself)
chgrp sys /dbs1/* (for the first subdir)
... and maybe further downwards is no errors yet.
Thierry.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

Thierry is correct. In order to change the owner or group, you must own the file and have
the CHOWN privilege.

You could confer this privilege to the "dba" group by using the 'setprivgrp' command. See the man pages (1M) for 'setprivgrp'.

...JRF...

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

What does 'getprivgrp -g' return? It should (at least) have:

global privileges: CHOWN

Also: Do you have a file /etc/privgroup ?

...JRF...

[Chris Calabrese]

Changing ownerships or groups of filesystem mount points can be tricky. Usually you need to have the filesystem unmounted, change the ownerships, and then re-mount. You could play around with changing /dbs1/. and /dbs1/.., which sometimes works (depending on the OS flavor - I don't think I've ever done this with HP-UX).