Issue with changing permissions

Question

I don't understand why the permission does not change for a user when I run the chmod command with fakeroot.

Initially, the file has these permissions:

-rwxr-xr-x  a.txt*

When I try to change the permission for the file using chmod it works fine:

chmod 111 a.txt

---x--x--x  a.txt*

When I run it with fakeroot it doesn't seem to do the work fine. It sets the permissions for group and other correctly, but not for the user. The permissions for read and write are set, no matter what the 1st value in chmod command is.

fakeroot chmod 111 a.txt

-rwx--x--x  a.txt*

Am I missing something?

Answer 1

From the man page:

Here is an example session with fakeroot. Notice that inside the fake root environment file manipulation that requires root privileges succeeds, but is not really happening.(...) Only the effects that user joost could do anyway happen for real.

So, I guess the userid you are using only has rights to change the 'group' and 'other' settings and these changes are 'really' executed.