Debian Bug report logs - #27248
fileutils: chown resets suid and sgid bits, but it is undocumented

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Message #5 received at submit@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Teddy Hogeborn <teddy@fukt.hk-r.se>

To: submit@bugs.debian.org

Subject: fileutils: chown resets suid and sgid bits, but it is undocumented

Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 11:26:24 +0200

Package: fileutils
Version: 3.16-5.3

Documentation bug:

The glibc chown(2) call resets suid and sgid bits, and the behaviour
is documented.  The documentation for the chown(1) command (which
calls chown(2)) does *not* mention this quirk, however.

Wishlist item:

Since the resetting of suid and sgid bits is not traditional (is was
not in 4.3BSD), maybe there should be a option switch to turn it off?

Or maybe it should not even be the default for directories?

Rant:

I can sort of understand the reason for this behaviour when applied to
executable files (the chown(2) manpage implies that POSIX specifies
it), but what is the rationale for it when applied to suid and/or sgid
directories?  Does POSIX specify that as well?  What about the sgid
bit when just changing the user, and vice versa?

(Should I submit this behaviour on directories as a libc bug?)

It seems really meaningless (and it's especially annoying) to have the
sgid bit disappear on a sgid directory with a special group when you
just do a "chown" and don't even specify a different group.

Even more so considering that older unices didn't do that, and it
therefore breaks older programs (like SmartList) which assume they can
do chmod g+s on a directory and then chown it to some user.

/Teddy

-- System Information
Debian Release: 2.0
Kernel Version: Linux nigol 2.0.34 #1 Tue Aug 18 03:24:20 MEST 1998 i486 unknown

Versions of the packages fileutils depends on:
ii  libc6           2.0.7t-1       The GNU C library version 2 (run-time files)

Message #10 received at 27248@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org>

To: 27248@bugs.debian.org

Subject: re: fileutils: chown resets suid and sgid bits, but it is undocumented

Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 18:49:23 -0400

This is actually a linux kernel function, not a fileutils or glibc
issue. The chown(1) documentation isn't specific to linux, so it
wouldn't mention our implementation details. I'm probably going to close
this bug unless someone comes up with a reason not to, as I'm leery of
maintaining documentation that differs from upstream's.

Mike Stone

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