non-superuser chown(2)s considered harmful

[John F Haugh II]

In article <109958 at convex.convex.com> tchrist at convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:
>I consider non-superuser chown(2)s harmful.  They screw up anyone who's
>trying to do post-facto disk accounting or pre-emptive disk quotas.
>Believe it or not, a lot of sites really do use one or both of these,
>and giving away files makes this effectively useless.  These aren't
>solely educational sites either. 

If an operating system can support unlink() and creat()/open() in a
quota environment, there is NO reason it cannot support chown().

As for the annoying aspects of non-superuser chown(), such as
mischevious users, that's an administrative problem.
-- 
John F. Haugh II                             UUCP: ...!cs.utexas.edu!rpp386!jfh
Ma Bell: (512) 832-8832                           Domain: jfh at rpp386.cactus.org