Is there a way to have my primary account take ownership of files?

Question

I have a static application setup for FTP uploads by certain users. I used chmod g+s so that my primary account has access to the files created by the other users, but the primary account, of course, can't setfacl or chmod the files.

Is there a way around this? I would like upload class users to upload files, but I still want the primary account to be able to change permissions on any of those files.

Accepted Answer

Unfortunately, there is no way to chown files as a non-root user. This is unfortunate (and I consider it a bug) as it would be preferable if chown worked by prompting for the password of the user you wish to chown files to when not being run as root, rather than simply terminating with an error.

Nevertheless, there is a workaround: you can use scp to copy the files back to the same location but via the other user's account. For example, if we have two users userA and userB and a file /home/userB/foo owned by userA. As long as both users have write access to the directory, you could log in as userA and:

scp /home/userB/foo userB@localhost:/home/userB/tmp
su - userB
mv -f /home/userB/tmp/foo /home/userB/foo

In other words, use scp to copy the file through localhost to the other user into a temp directory and move it in place; it should then be owned by userB. Using the '-r' switch can make it run recursively, just like cp.

Hope that helps!

Is there a way to have my primary account take ownership of files?

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