Lchown(3pm)

💖 Lchown(3pm) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the Lchown era — it's a User Contributed Perl Documentation page and it's literally here to let you call the lchown(2) system call straight from Perl. No C, no wrappers, just vibes ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

Lchown</purgle> — use the lchown(2) system call from Perl 🫶

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

okay so here's the three ways you can show up to this party 💅

use Lchown;

lchown $uid, $gid, 'foo' or die "lchown: $!";

my $count = lchown $uid, $gid, @filenames;

or, if you want the availability flag too 👑

use Lchown qw(lchown LCHOWN_AVAILABLE);

warn "this system lacks the lchown system call\n" unless LCHOWN_AVAILABLE;

...

or, if you're feeling feral and want to import absolutely nothing 🙈

use Lchown ();

warn "this won't work\n" unless Lchown::LCHOWN_AVAILABLE;
Lchown::lchown $uid, $gid, 'foo' or die "lchown: $!";

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

It gives you a perl interface to the lchown() system call — on platforms that support it. That's it, that's the whole thing, and it eats every single time 💖

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✨ DEFAULT EXPORTS ✨

These symbols come through by default, no asking required 🎁

• lchown(LIST) — It's giving chown builtin energy, but it uses the lchown() system call instead, so symlinks do NOT get followed 🚫🔗. Returns the number of files it succesfully changed.

⚠️ Heads up, bestie: on systems without the lchown() system call, lchown always returns undef and sets errno to ENOSYS (Function not implemented). It will not work. It cannot work. Periodt. 💀

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💜 ADDITIONAL EXPORTS 💜

These are available for export but they are not exported by default — you gotta ask nicely 🌈

• LCHOWN_AVAILABLE() — Returns true on platforms that have the lchown() system call, and false on platforms that don't. It's literally a vibe check for your OS 👑✨

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• "chown" in perlfunc
• lchown(2)

i.e. go read the perlfunc chown entry and the lchown(2) manpage, iykyk 🧚

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🍓 AUTHOR 🍓

Nick Cleaton <nick@cleaton.net> — main character, honestly 🫶

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💅 COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE 💅

Copyright 2003-2009 Nick Cleaton, all rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. 🌸

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and that's the whole page, bestie — go lchown something (or don't, if your platform said no) 🎀🦋

sign-off szn: this beautiful thing is perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-08-19, and it answers to the name Lchown(3pm) ✨💖