If you can chown any file your not a regular user, your a root user
and you can look at and change any file on the system, so the simple
answer to your question is no.

What is the application here?





" Stamp out root login's .  .  .  . su "   --Bruce Anderson  
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On Fri, Jul 14, 2000 2:51 PM, Avi Norowitz <mailto:avin@ice.tj> wrote:
>What's the purpose of that? Once they have the ability to chown
>everything to them, they can simply `chown me /etc/passwd` and add
>themselves a root account. :-)
>
>> Edvard Lauman wrote:
>> 
>> this is kind of off topic, but say I wanted to give someone the
>> ability to chown anything and everything on a machine, even if they
>> weren't root, but I don't want to make them root. i.e. they have
>> root's ability to chown everything, but other than that, they're a
>> regular user. How would I do that? Ed
>
>-- 
>     Avi Norowitz  avin@ice.tj
>         Ice Mail  http://www.ice.tj
>
>