Mac OS X : Why does chown report "Operation not permitted"?

Posted by josef.van.niekerk on Super User See other posts from Super User or by josef.van.niekerk
Published on 2011-05-04T20:42:49Z Indexed on 2012/09/29 9:40 UTC
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file-permissions

I am trying to do the following on my Mac (10.6.7) :

sudo chown myusername:wheel ./entries

but Unix/Mac is returning "Operation not permitted". When I ls -lash, the culprit file, it looks as follows:

8 -rwxrwxrwx   1 myusername  staff   394B Apr 26 23:26 entries

I've tried sudo, I've tried sudo su, nothing works? Any ideas what's up?

The files I'm trying to chmod I've copied from my old Ubuntu box, most of the files have successfully chmodded recursively, just this one is stuck and I don't understand why.

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