minix man page for chown

CHOWN(2)							System Calls Manual							  CHOWN(2)

NAME
       chown - change owner and group of a file

SYNOPSIS
       int chown(const char *path, int owner, int group)

DESCRIPTION
       The file that is named by path has its owner and group changed as specified.  Only the super-user may change the owner of the file, because
       if users were able to give files away, they could defeat file-space accounting procedures.  The owner of the file may change the group to a
       group of which he is a member.

       On  some  systems,  chown  clears  the set-user-id and set-group-id bits on the file to prevent accidental creation of set-user-id and set-
       group-id programs.

RETURN VALUE
       Zero is returned if the operation was successful; -1 is returned if an error occurs, with a more specific error code being  placed  in  the
       global variable errno.

ERRORS
       Chown will fail and the file will be unchanged if:

       [ENOTDIR]      A component of the path prefix is not a directory.

       [ENAMETOOLONG] The path name exceeds PATH_MAX characters.

       [ENOENT]       The named file does not exist.

       [EACCES]       Search permission is denied for a component of the path prefix.

       [ELOOP]	      Too many symbolic links were encountered in translating the pathname.  (Minix-vmd)

       [EPERM]	      The effective user ID is not the super-user.

       [EROFS]	      The named file resides on a read-only file system.

       [EFAULT]       Path points outside the process's allocated address space.

       [EIO]	      An I/O error occurred while reading from or writing to the file system.

SEE ALSO
       chown(8), chgrp(1), chmod(2).

4th Berkeley Distribution					   May 22, 1986 							  CHOWN(2)