chown gives misleading error message

[Peter Jeffe 512.823.4091]

In article <33593 at cup.portal.com> compata at cup.portal.com (David H Close) writes:
>I also noticed that chown would not allow me to change the ownership of
>a file which I owned.  The message was ~"must be owner or root".  Of course,
>I was the owner!  Running as root bypassed the problem.

This message is a verbose but perhaps equally vague translation of the good
old EPERM ("Not owner") message; you can set your LANG environment variable
to C if you'd rather get the old messages instead of the "Standardized
English" ones that are produced by LANG=En_US.

In any case, chown() has always returned EPERM if you have insufficient
privileges.  If you want to find fault with the poor overworked errlst
messages, then post to comp.unix, but please don't ask IBM to mess with
them any more than they already have!

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Peter Jeffe   ...uunet!cs.utexas.edu!ibmaus!auschs!sandino.austin.ibm.com!jeffe
        first they want a disclaimer, then they make you pee in a jar,
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