VB.NET

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.

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Dim success As Boolean = False

'  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.

Dim sftp As New Chilkat.SFtp

'  Connect, authenticate, and initialize the SFTP subsystem.
Dim port As Integer = 22
success = sftp.Connect("sftp.example.com",port)
If (success = False) Then
    Debug.WriteLine(sftp.LastErrorText)
    Exit Sub
End If


'  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.
Dim password As String = "mySshPassword"

success = sftp.AuthenticatePw("mySshLogin",password)
If (success = False) Then
    Debug.WriteLine(sftp.LastErrorText)
    Exit Sub
End If


success = sftp.InitializeSftp()
If (success = False) Then
    Debug.WriteLine(sftp.LastErrorText)
    Exit Sub
End If


'  The 1st argument is a path, so isHandle is False.  Changing ownership typically requires
'  elevated privileges on the server.
Dim isHandle As Boolean = False
success = sftp.SetOwnerAndGroup("subdir/report.pdf",isHandle,"www-data","www-data")
If (success = False) Then
    Debug.WriteLine(sftp.LastErrorText)
    Exit Sub
End If

Debug.WriteLine("Owner and group set.")

sftp.Disconnect()