From: utzoo!decvax!cca!HOLSTEGE@Cit-20@sri-unix Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Title: chown Article-I.D.: sri-unix.2976 Posted: Fri Aug 27 22:12:46 1982 Received: Wed Sep 8 06:34:50 1982 Date: 23 Aug 1982 1448-PDT One reason for not allowing users to chown their files is that tar, at least on UNIX-TS, attempts to chown the files it extracts from tape to their original owner. Needless to say, if you are transferring from one machine to another, this is disaster. You wind up making a directory tree owned by someone else, possibly a non-existent someone else. Worse, usually the directories are mode 755, so you can't even delete any of it. All you can do is get the superuser to fix it all. This makes tar pretty painful for moving software from one machine to another. -------