Re: strange thing appens on SCO

[jepstein () WEBMETHODS COM (Jeremy Epstein)]

Ahhh, ancient history.

On OSes derived from UNIX System V (including SCO), unprivileged users can
give away ownership of their files using the chown() system call (which is
exactly what "cp -p" does).  When you give away ownership, it clears the
setuid and setgid bits (if either was set) to avoid the obvious security
risk.  BSD-derived systems don't allow giving away file ownership unless
you're a privileged user.

This was described in the POSIX standard as an optional behavior, to allow
both the System V behavior that you described, as well as the BSD behavior
which is what Linux seems to implement.

In other words, this is a feature, not a bug :-)

--Jeremy (a UNIX programmer for almost a quarter of a century)