From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.79 [en] (Win98; U) Description of problem: cd /tmp and issue touch testfile as root. Then issue chown <user_id> testfile. The session is terminated immediately and the file was not changed. If you issue a fully qualified /bin/chown, it works just fine. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.cd /tmp 2. touch testfile 3. chown testfile <user_id> Actual Results: The logged in session is terminated immediately. Expected Results: The ownership of the file should have been changed to the new user_id Additional info: standard i686 smp kernel dual Pentium 1.13MHZ on Tyan Tiger 2507 MB 768MB RAM ATI Rage 128 Pro AGP graphics card 3 IDE drives 1 IDE CD-RW adaptec 2940UW PRO SCSI controller 1 SCSI CD-RW 1 SCSI tape drive 1 Linksys 100 LAN card SoundBlaster 5.1 !Live US Robotics internal PCI modem This is on a fresh 7.3 install from CD - custom install choosing everything.
Huh? [root@locutus root]# cd /tmp [root@locutus tmp]# touch testfile [root@locutus tmp]# chown bero testfile [root@locutus tmp]# ls -l testfile -rw-r--r-- 1 bero root 0 Jun 2 17:47 testfile Looks like someone cracked your machine and either put an "alias chmod=logout" in your startup scripts, or put an alternate chown doing evil things in a location earlier on in the PATH than /bin. You can figure out which chown is being executed by typing "which chown".