chown - Operation not permitted

Question

I'm logged in as minime.

I don't understand why it doesn't allow me to chown file that I own without su privileges. Obviously I can use sudo, but I'd like to understand why? because of www-data group?

chown minime:www-data user-functions.php

ls -lh

-rw-r--r--  1 minime minime    24K Jan  6 16:11 user-functions.php

Error:

chown: changing ownership of `user-functions.php': Operation not permitted

Answer 1

Non-privileged users (not root) cannot chown files to other user names. To use chown, a user must have the privileges of the target user. In other words, only root can give a file to another user.

As explained here (thanks @slhck):

Only processes with an effective user ID equal to the user ID of the file or with appropriate privileges may change the ownership of a file. If _POSIX_CHOWN_RESTRICTED is in effect for path:

• Changing the user ID is restricted to processes with appropriate privileges.

• Changing the group ID is permitted to a process with an effective user ID equal to the user ID of the file, but without appropriate privileges, if and only if owner is equal to the file's user ID or ( uid_t)-1 and group is equal either to the calling process' effective group ID or to one of its supplementary group IDs.

The rationale behind this has been nicely explained by @Gilles in this Unix & Linux answer:

The reason for this restriction is that giving away a file to another user can allow bad things to happen in uncommon, but still important situations. For example:

• If a system has disk quotas enabled, Alice could create a world-writable file under a directory accessible only by her (so no one else could access that world-writable file in the directory), and then run chown to make that file owned by another user Bill. The file would then count under Bill's disk quota even though only Alice can use the file.
• If Alice gives away a file to Bill, there is no trace that Bill didn't create that file. This can be a problem if the file contains illegal or otherwise compromising data.
• Some programs require that their input file belongs to a particular user in order to authenticate a request (for example, the file contains some instructions that the program will perform on behalf of that user). This is usually not a secure design, because even if Bill created a file containing syntactically correct instructions, he might not have intended to execute them at this particular time. Nonetheless, allowing Alice to create a file with arbitrary content and have it taken as input from Bill can only make things worse.