Problem Deleting Directory & Files

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Thu, 2009-02-12 at 08:44 +1100, Cameron Simpson wrote:
> On 11Feb2009 08:23, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:
> | On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 21:41 -0700, Kirk wrote:
> | > I installed a tarball and then discovered I didn't need it.  I tried to
> | > delete the director & files but permission gets denied.  I tried to
> | > chmod but it wouldn't work on the files or directory.  I checked the
> | > permissions which said I'm not the owner & can't change them.
> | 
> | If you're not the owner then you must have been superuser when you did
> | the installation (or you were logged in as a different user). In any
> | case, become that user again using 'su' and proceed.
> 
> On several UNIX platforms it's possible to give files away, and a tar
> unpack quite often preserves the ownerships from inside the tar archive,
> even as non-root. I'm fairly sure I've had this happen to me on Linux,
> and so it's quite possible he wasn't root during the unpack.

It's true that tar tries to preserve ownerships, but if he wasn't
running it as root there's no way it could do this.

It is *not* possible to give files away (using chown) without being
privileged i.e. essentially root. Historically, this is at least in part
to avoid people getting round filesystem quotas.

Note that neither tar nor chown are setuid.

poc