chown gives misleading error message

[David H Close]

larry at morpho.UUCP wrote that he was having trouble changing ownership of
a file of which he was the owner.

I also noticed that chown would not allow me to change the ownership of
a file which I owned.  The message was ~"must be owner or root".  Of course,
I was the owner!  Running as root bypassed the problem.

Calling AIX defect support, I learned that the message is a compromise
and does not accurately define the problem.  As I recall (my memory is
unclear), the actual problem related to the group set.  Either I or the
intended new owner were not in the defined group.  You might check the
group set (with smit) to insure those are defined properly.

Actually, my memory partially returns.  My problem was with chgrp, not
chown.  So maybe my answer isn't really appropriate after all.  Try it,
maybe there's a clue in here somewhere.

Dave Close, Compata, Arlington, Texas
compata at cup.portal.com
compata at mcimail.com