On Tue, 2006-07-25 at 21:18 +1000, Paul Dwerryhouse wrote: > On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 07:44:14PM +1000, Ben Stringer wrote: > > I observed this today on an RHEL4 system, and it applies to Fedora also. > > I don't understand why this occurs - is it a security feature? > > [snip] > > > If anyone can shed light on this for me, I would appreciate it. > > It's fairly standard for Unix systems; as far as I can remember, > Solaris, Tru64, and every other Unix-like OS I've come across does this, > too. Thanks Paul. I tried it on a Solaris 8 system, and did not see the same behaviour. > > I can't think, off the top of my head, of a specific need for it to > happen (since a user can't change the ownership or group of another > user's file); it's probably done just to force an admin to confirm that > they still want the file to be setuid/setgid when they alter it. I suspected as much, but it seems a little arbitrary (why not also clear these bits if the file changes size, for instance) and a little undocumented. Cheers, Ben
