Re: coreutils 5.93, more bad error messages on Solaris

[Jim Meyering]

Keith Thompson <address@hidden> wrote:
> I'm seeing some more misleading error messages in corutils 5.93
> on Solaris.  These are similar to the problem I reported on
> Mon 2005-10-31, subject
>     coreutils 5.92, rm <dir> on Solaris, bad error message
> (corrected in 5.93).
>
> % ls -ls tmp
> 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 kst sys200 0 Dec  5 13:41 tmp
> % uname -a
> SunOS elmak 5.9 Generic_117171-17 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Blade-100 Solaris
> % ls -l tmp
> -rw-r--r-- 1 kst sys200 0 Dec  5 13:41 tmp
> % chown --version | head -1
> chown (GNU coreutils) 5.93
> % chown root tmp
> chown: changing ownership of `tmp': Not owner
> % chgrp --version | head -1
> chgrp (GNU coreutils) 5.93
> % chgrp root tmp
> chgrp: changing group of `tmp': Not owner

Thanks for the report.

However, the problem is that the chown syscall fails with EPERM,
which renders (on Solaris) as `Not owner' in English.
Since Sun's /usr/bin/chown and chgrp work the same way,
I'm in no hurry to `fix' it.

On Linux, I get the more sensible (at least in this case)
`Operation not permitted'.