Linux – Chown operation not permitted for root

chowndebianlinuxroot

I try to chown the owner of a file to root, but I can't. I'm doing this as root. I get the following message:

chown: changing ownership of `ps': Operation not permitted

The immutable attribute might be set on the file. Remove it with

chattr -i <file>

Most everything in /bin/ should be owned by root:root, so if you run the following you can fix the ownership on those files:

chown root:root -R /bin/

You may also want to make sure the setuid bit is properly set on /bin/su, which you can fix with the following:

chmod 4755 /bin/su

sudo service apache2 restart # no errors
service apache2 restart      # errors