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Bug 487582

Summary: Root chown of file does not preserve setuid bit
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Reporter: Victor Gregorio <contactvictorg>
Component: coreutilsAssignee: Ondrej Vasik <ovasik>
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG QA Contact: BaseOS QE <qe-baseos-auto>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: low    
Version: 5.2CC: tim.w.connors
Target Milestone: rc   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2009-03-03 14:26:39 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Victor Gregorio 2009-02-26 20:15:57 UTC 
Description of problem:

On RHEL5, chown 0 <file> does not preserve the setuid bit of <file>.  This behavior is different than RHEL4, which preserves the setuid.  Is this change in /bin/chown's behavior intentional?

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

CentOS release 5.2 (Final)
coreutils-5.97-14.el5

How reproducible:

Always

Steps to Reproduce:

[root@flatline ~]# touch test
[root@flatline ~]# chmod u+s test
[root@flatline ~]# ls -l test
-rwSr--r-- 1 root root 0 Feb 26 04:11 test

[root@flatline ~]# chown 0 test
[root@flatline ~]# ls -l test
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Feb 26 04:11 test

Expected results:

The setuid bit is preserved when running the above steps on RHEL4

Additional info:

http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9706.0/0068.html
Comment 1 Ondrej Vasik 2009-03-03 14:26:39 UTC 
Thanks for report, I agree it is somewhat tricky behaviour but as said in 

upstream NEWS 5.3.0 (between RHEL-4 and RHEL-5):
"Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
and group already have the desired value.  This optimization was
incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
special permission bits, as POSIX requires."

Posix formulation (http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/utilities/chown.html):
"Unless chown is invoked by a process with appropriate privileges, the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits of a regular file shall be cleared upon successful completion; the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits of other file types may be cleared."

As no change is succesful completition it looks like POSIX requires it. Therefore I would call it NOTABUG and intentional change as we should be as POSIX compliant as possible. Closing NOTABUG.
Comment 2 Tim Connors 2010-07-27 01:07:43 UTC 
You missed the first part of that clause though, Ondrej:

"Unless chown is invoked by a process with appropriate privileges"

I believe root has appropriate privileges.  I suspect that clause is not in support of the change made in the 2.6 kernel.  There may be other clauses, but not this one.

I believe this is still a bug.