Re: set owner/group on FreeBSD

[Bob Proulx]

Bill Moseley <address@hidden> [2002-09-18 23:56:20 -0700]:
> bash-2.05a$ touch /tmp/foo
> bash-2.05a$ mv /tmp/foo .
> mv: ./foo: set owner/group (was: 3830/0): Operation not permitted
> bash-2.05a$ ls foo
> foo

This seems to be a problem with 'mv' on the system and autoconf is
just suffering from that.  Can you say to the list some more
information?  Is this the FreeBSD version of mv or perhaps the GNU mv?
'mv --version' should say something.  And what is '.' in the context
above?  What is the mode of the /tmp directory?  What is the mode of
the file you created?  Are you working on two different filesystems?
Lots of questions.

The output of the following commands would be useful to see.

  id
  touch /tmp/foo
  ls -ld /tmp/foo /tmp .
  df /tmp .
  mv /tmp/foo .

Typically /tmp is set 'drwxrwxrwt root root' and the 't' bit is the
important bit.  It says that you must own the file to delete it.

Typically a system's privilege operation mechanism will not allow a
non-root user to chown the owner of a file to another owner.  You may
chgrp to other groups if you own the file.  But not chown.

Those two behaviors together create a good environment to work with
files in /tmp and elsewhere.  Which you are _not_ seeing.  'mv' will
try to rename the file if possible.  If not possible because it is on
two different filesystems then it will copy the file and try to set
the new copy to the same permissions, user, group as the original
source file.  That is the part for which you are seeing error
messages.  Which looks really strange to see where you are seeing it.

It looks like you are running as root and trying to write to a NFS
mounted filesystem.  Which of course can't work.  But the errors don't
_quite_ say that either.

Bob