How to use chown/chgrp as a normal user to change user-ownership of files

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • We have some applications that are being migrated from UNIX and expect to be able to use chown as normal non-root users to change file ownership. This always fails in RHEL with an error message like the following:
chown: changing ownership of `somefile': Operation not permitted

Is there any way to get around this?
- Running chgrp as a non-root user fails to change the group ownership with the following error message.

chgrp: changing group of `somefile': Operation not permitted
  • rsync fails to change the ownership of user/group if used with -a flag.
# rsync -a file1 file2
rsync: chgrp "/test/.file2.wJyVrN" failed: Operation not permitted (1)
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at main.c(892) [sender=2.6.8]

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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