How do I change the owner:group of a symlink?

[v_thunder]

I am testing this on HP-UX 11.00 on PA-RISC.

The perl chown command is following links when the last argument is a symbolic link and not a normal file. I'd like to change the ownership of the link itself.

Just for completeness: GNU chown sets the owner:group of the link itself. HP-UX's chown behaves as perl does.

SoPWified - dvergin 2002-05-24

[Marza]

Actually you can't in Perl.

As Tom Christiansen has said(I don't remember where):

"Perl doesn't do this. Do you know why many systems don't support the idea? Because it conveys no distict functionality. Modes and owners and times on symbolic links have no meaning. So why bother? And it's very non-portable."

Now as to making a system call. Did you use the "-h" option? I did and it did change the link's ownership without changing the file.

[v_thunder]

Oh, bummer. I know it doesn't really matter, but I just need this group of to be owned by bin:bin. Just, uh, because :)

And you are absolutely right about the -h option. I don't know how I missed it, it's the first option on HP-UX's chown(1) manpage!

Thanks a bunch,
-Dan

[Anonymous Monk]

use Lchown;

lchown $uid, $gid, @linknames or 
   die "Can't 'lchown($uid, $gid, @linknames)': $!";

See Lchown for details.