[ervier]

I wanted to change the owner of some files on my system to ervier:staff. The command I used is:

sudo chown ervier:staff *

being in the right folder. The message I get is "operation not permitted", while I have admin-rights.

I've done this several times and it always worked as expected, but now it doesn't. It's a bunch of MS Powerpoint files, copied from work (Windows network). If I open the finder and use the info-window, it says the files are protected, but the checkbox is greyed out, so I cannot change it.

I know there is a simple solution: open all files seperately and save under a different filename. But I want to know what's going on here.

[superlarry]

maybe you'll have to log in as root (the administrator user) to do this (although i'm not sure why). to do this, type "su" in the terminal, and enter your root password when it asks. then you can try the chown command, and exit when you're done (don't mess around too much as root - you have read/write access to every file and can really screw things up).
if you haven't set up a root password yet, you can do it with the terminal command "sudo passwd root".
best of luck!

[pat++]

Can you list the files with ls -l and post the result here so that we can see what they look like (permissions, owner, etc...)

edit: I managed to reproduce the same behaviour by locking the file. Make sure your files are not Locked...