chown - permission issue !!!

[Sangal-Arun]

Can someone please tell why I'm not able to change the owner of this file.
Thanks-

[/efare1/Copy1/Database] $ ls -ltd Proxy
drwxr-xr-x  2 qabuild DENCCEFS 4096 Aug 26 15:59 Proxy/

[/efare1/Copy1/Database] $ cd Proxy

[/efare1/Copy1/Database/Proxy] $ ls -ltr
total 40
-rwxr-xr-x  1 qabuild DENCCEFS 4785 Nov 21  2003 proxy.tcl*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 qabuild DENCCEFS 1292 May 19  2005 proxy.c*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 qabuild DENCCEFS  497 May 19  2005 makeproxy.c*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 qabuild DENCCEFS 1624 Jun 29  2005 tclIndex*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 qabuild DENCCEFS 5574 Jun 29  2005 packages.tcl*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 qabuild DENCCEFS  842 Jun 29  2005 Makefile*
-rwxrwxr-x  1 qabuild DENCCEFS 5807 Aug 26 15:59 proxy*

[/efare1/Copy1/Database/Proxy] $ chown efare proxy
chown: changing ownership of `proxy': Operation not permitted

[/efare1/Copy1/Database/Proxy] $

[vanoden]

What user are you logged in as? I'm obviously you can't change the permissions of a file you cannot write to, but I'm also pretty sure you can't change ownership of a file to someone you are not. It leaves changing the ownership of a file pretty slim...

Unless, of course, your are root or can execute commands are root using sudo...

If you can write to the directory, you can copy the file to a different name, delete the current file, and then change the name of the copy back to the original. This will leave you a file owned as your current user.