LCHOWN(3P)

💖 LCHOWN(3P) — the POSIX Programmer's Manual, but make it make sense 💖

okay so before we even get into it, bestie, a little PROLOG moment 🫶

This manual page is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual. The Linux implementation of this interface may differ (consult the corresponding Linux manual page for details of Linux behavior), or the interface may not be implemented on Linux.

like... it might not even exist on your machine. vibe check your platform first, fr fr. 💀

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✨ NAME ✨

lchown — change the owner and group of a symbolic link 🦋

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

#include <unistd.h>

int lchown(const char *path, uid_t owner, gid_t group);

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

okay so lchown() is literally chown()'s twin, same energy, except for ONE very specific situation: when the file you're naming is a symbolic link. 🙈

In that case? lchown() changes the ownership of the symbolic link file itself. Meanwhile chown() changes the ownership of the file or directory that the symbolic link points at. not the link, the destination. the way those two just diverge... iconic. 👑

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⭐ RETURN VALUE ⭐

• If it works: lchown() returns 0. slay. ✨
• If it doesn't: it returns -1 and sets errno to tell you what went wrong. 😭

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🔥 ERRORS 🔥

The lchown() function shall fail if:

• EACCES — search permission is denied on a component of the path prefix of path. 🚫
• EINVAL — the owner or group ID is not a value supported by the implementation. 👀
• ELOOP — a loop exists in symbolic links encountered during resolution of the path argument. 🌀
• ENAMETOOLONG — the length of a component of a pathname is longer than {NAME_MAX}. 📏
• ENOENT — a component of path does not name an existing file, or path is an empty string. 🫥
• ENOTDIR — a component of the path prefix names an existing file that is neither a directory nor a symbolic link to a directory, or the path argument contains at least one non-<slash> character and ends with one or more trailing <slash> characters and the last pathname component names an existing file that is neither a directory nor a symbolic link to a directory. 😵‍💫
• EPERM — the effective user ID does not match the owner of the file and the process does not have appropriate privileges. no permission no party. 🙅
• EROFS — the file resides on a read-only file system. 🔒

The lchown() function may fail if:

• EIO — an I/O error occurred while reading or writing to the file system. 💀
• EINTR — a signal was caught during execution of the function. 😳
• ELOOP — more than {SYMLOOP_MAX} symbolic links were encountered during resolution of the path argument. 🌀🌀
• ENAMETOOLONG — the length of a pathname exceeds {PATH_MAX}, or pathname resolution of a symbolic link produced an intermediate result with a length that exceeds {PATH_MAX}. 📐

The following sections are informative.

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🎀 EXAMPLES 🎀

Changing the Current Owner of a File

ok so here's the moment: this example shows how to change the ownership of the symbolic link named /modules/pass1 to the user ID associated with `jones` and the group ID associated with `cnd`. 💖

The numeric value for the user ID is obtained by using the getpwnam() function. The numeric value for the group ID is obtained by using the getgrnam() function. names → numbers, that's the whole trick. ✨

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <pwd.h>
#include <grp.h>

struct passwd *pwd;
struct group  *grp;
char          *path = "/modules/pass1";
...
pwd = getpwnam("jones");
grp = getgrnam("cnd");
lchown(path, pwd->pw_uid, grp->gr_gid);

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🦋 APPLICATION USAGE 🦋

On implementations which support symbolic links as directory entries rather than files, lchown() may fail. 🙈 so like... read the room before you call it.

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💜 RATIONALE 💜

None. literally nothing. moving on bestie. 🫶

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🌈 FUTURE DIRECTIONS 🌈

None. the future is bright and it contains zero changes to this function. ⭐

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• chown()
• symlink()

The Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, <unistd.h> 🌸

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💖 COPYRIGHT 💖

Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form from IEEE Std 1003.1-2017, Standard for Information Technology -- Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7, 2018 Edition, Copyright (C) 2018 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc and The Open Group. In the event of any discrepancy between this version and the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard, the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard is the referee document. The original Standard can be obtained online at http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html .

Any typographical or formatting errors that appear in this page are most likely to have been introduced during the conversion of the source files to man page format. To report such errors, see https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html .

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! this one came from IEEE/The Open Group, 2017 — LCHOWN(3P), the third section, the P for POSIX, the whole package. go change some symlink ownership and be your main character self 💅✨🦋