I am trying to run chown and chmod from a script owned by root. The permissions are set to 4755 so that users can execute the script as root. However, when I run the script as a user other than root, I get "Operation not permitted" for both chown and chmod. Any ideas as to why this is?

setuid doesn't usually work with scripts it's a security feature, if you check you will find that the script does not run as root.

You will need a biary wrapper to allow you to do that, or possibly you could do it with Perl.

i actually just tested a quick script on solaris 9 with suid bit set and it does work ...

$ id
uid=1001(otto) gid=10(staff)
$ ls -l test
-rwsr-xr-x   1 root     other         61 Apr  1 19:05 test
$ cat test
#! /bin/ksh
chown otto joke
chmod 444 joke
ls -l joke
exit 0
$ ./test
-r--r--r--   1 otto     other        568 Apr  1 17:36 joke
$ ls -l
total 64
-r--r--r--   1 otto     other        568 Apr  1 17:36 joke
-rwsr-xr-x   1 root     other         61 Apr  1 19:05 test
$

But who was joke originally owned by?

Only kidding it did work for me too on Solaris 9, but I was pretty sure it shouldn't.

See this post.

Thanks Perderabo, I stand enlightened.

make sure that you're not running the script on a mounted filesystem that has the "nosuid" bit on ...