Bug 53750 – chown --dereference does not work properly

• Status: RESOLVED FIXED
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description Georgi Georgiev 2004-06-12 15:44:14 UTC]

It seems like an old, old problem with chown has surfaced again. At least, I have the same problem that is described at http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-fileutils/2000-12/msg00008.html and I did not have it a few months back. Quoting:

  # ls -l
  total 4
  -rw-r--r--   1 user1    users           5 Oct 26 14:33 regularfile
  lrwxrwxrwx   1 user1    users          11 Oct 26 14:34 symlink -> regularfile

  # chown -v user2 symlink ; ls -l
  owner of symlink changed to user2
  total 4
  -rw-r--r--   1 user1    users           5 Oct 26 14:33 regularfile
  lrwxrwxrwx   1 user2    users          11 Oct 26 14:34 symlink -> regularfile

  # chown -v --dereference user2 symlink; ls -l
  owner of symlink retained as user2
  total 4
  -rw-r--r--   1 user1   users           5 Oct 26 14:33 regularfile
  lrwxrwxrwx   1 user2   users          11 Oct 26 14:34 symlink -> regularfile

[Comment 1 Georgi Georgiev 2004-06-12 15:45:27 UTC]

Ah, coreutils-5.2.1 is the version.

[Comment 2 SpanKY 2005-01-07 18:53:16 UTC]

verified that it's still an issue with coreutils-5.2.1-r3

touch regularfile
ln -s regularfile symlink
chown bin regularfile symlink
ls -l regularfile symlink
chown -v root symlink
chown -v --dereference root
ls -l regularfile symlink

[Comment 3 SpanKY 2005-01-07 21:26:41 UTC]

i grabbed a patch from upstream cvs for chown-core.c to fix this ... added to 5.2.1-r4, thanks