Perl

Set a Remote File's Owner and Group

Demonstrates the Chilkat SFtp.SetOwnerAndGroup method, which sets the owner and group of a remote item. The arguments are the remote path (or handle), whether the first argument is a handle, and the new owner and group values.

Background: This is the SFTP equivalent of chown. Changing ownership is a privileged operation on Unix systems — ordinary users generally cannot give their files away — so expect it to fail unless the authenticated account has the necessary rights. It is most often used by administrative jobs that upload files which must then belong to a service account, such as a web server user.

Chilkat Perl Downloads

Download Chilkat for Perl

Chilkat2 Perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Chilkat2;

# Demonstrates the SFtp.SetOwnerAndGroup method, which sets the owner and group of a remote item.
# The 1st argument is the remote path (or handle), the 2nd (isHandle) indicates which, and the
# 3rd and 4th are the new owner and group.

my $sftp = Chilkat2::SFtp->new;

# Connect, authenticate, and initialize the SFTP subsystem.
my $port = 22;
my $success = $sftp->Connect('sftp.example.com', $port);
if (!$success) {
    print $sftp->LastErrorText, "\n";
    exit;
}

# Normally you would not hard-code the password in source.  You should instead obtain it
# from an interactive prompt, environment variable, or a secrets vault.
my $password = 'mySshPassword';

$success = $sftp->AuthenticatePw('mySshLogin', $password);
if (!$success) {
    print $sftp->LastErrorText, "\n";
    exit;
}

$success = $sftp->InitializeSftp();
if (!$success) {
    print $sftp->LastErrorText, "\n";
    exit;
}

# The 1st argument is a path, so isHandle is 0.  Changing ownership typically requires
# elevated privileges on the server.
my $isHandle = 0;
$success = $sftp->SetOwnerAndGroup('subdir/report.pdf', $isHandle, 'www-data', 'www-data');
if (!$success) {
    print $sftp->LastErrorText, "\n";
    exit;
}

print "Owner and group set.\n";

$sftp->Disconnect();