chown is not changing symbolic link

Question

I'm trying to change the user/group of a symbolic link with the command:

$ chown -h myuser:mygroup mysymbolic/ 

But it's not changing. I'm logged in as root. The current user/group is set to root:root. What went wrong?

Answer 1

I was putting a slash in the end of target:

chown -h myuser:mygroup mysymbolic/ 

just removed the slash in the end and works. Here's the correct way:

 chown -h myuser:mygroup mysymbolic

Answer 2

I've tried this myself and it works for me. If you have the -h it changes the owner of the symbolic link, but if you dont then it changes the owner of the file itself and not the link.

But it doesnt seem to work of the symbolic link is linked to a directory

Answer 3

I was unable to chown a directory even with -h but using the full path worked.

# ls -al
drwxr-xr-x 2 deploy deploy 4096 Dec 30 10:29 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 deploy deploy 4096 Dec 30 08:59 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root   root     32 Dec 30 09:02 apps -> /u/apps/
# chown -h deploy:deploy apps
# ls -al
drwxr-xr-x 2 deploy deploy 4096 Dec 30 10:29 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 deploy deploy 4096 Dec 30 08:59 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root   root     32 Dec 30 09:02 apps -> /u/apps/
# chown -h deploy:deploy apps/
# ls -al
drwxr-xr-x 2 deploy deploy 4096 Dec 30 10:29 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 deploy deploy 4096 Dec 30 08:59 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root   root     32 Dec 30 09:02 apps -> /u/apps/
# pwd 
/var/www/html
# chown -h deploy:deploy /var/www/html/apps
# ls -al
drwxr-xr-x 2 deploy deploy 4096 Dec 30 10:29 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 deploy deploy 4096 Dec 30 08:59 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 deploy deploy   32 Dec 30 09:02 apps -> /u/apps/

Answer 4

Is the target a file or a directory?

If it is a directory then try -H (upper case H)

Answer 5

simply.

chown -h myuser:mygroup <symlink> [without trailing slash]

should be enough and work!  

Answer 6

Recreate that link by myuser at myuser's home, and mv this link to the target location by sudo.

For example: (as myuser), ln -s somedir/ linkname (will be a broken link if somedir/ doesn't exist in user's directory)

Then, sudo mv linkname targetlocation (will become a valid link provided targetlocation/somedir/ exists)

Answer 7

For Solaris (verified on S11.3) for a symbolic link to a directory you will need to run

root@ac11x017:/var/tmp$ ls -lal dumpdir
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root          16 Jun 15 09:08 dumpdir -> /data/dumpdir/
root@ac11x017:/var/tmp$ chown -RP oracle:oinstall dumpdir
lrwxrwxrwx   1 oracle   oinstall      16 Jun 15 09:09 dumpdir -> /data/dumpdir/

Answer 8

I had a similar problem. For me, I could not chmod the symbolic link even as root regardless how I called chmod. To add confusion to this, nautilus was showing the owner/group as nothing. The owner was just blank. So I tried to change the symbolic link using nautilus running as root since chmod wasn't working and nautilus crashed!!

But I think I figured out the problem. The directory the symbolic link was pointing to had different permissions than the symbolic link. So I chmod'ed the target directory (using -h) to my user/group name. Then chmod'ed the symbolic link to the same and it worked! And viewing the symbolic link's details in nautilus (with root permissions) now no longer crashes.

So for others having a similar problem, check the permissions of the target directory/file and make sure it is compatible with the permissions you are setting the symbolic link to.

Answer 9

Note that changing the owner of a symlink can only work if the target is accessible by the new user you want to assign it to.

For instance, if your target is inside a folder that the user you want to assign it to doesn't have enough rights, the ln -s command behavior is such that it will do nothing at all.