Within fakeroot, why does chown return EPERM even though it succeeds (but then again it didn't)?

I've been running into bizarre behavior when using [chown(2)](http://linux.die.net/man/2/chown) within a fakeroot environment. The following minimal program illustrates the issue: #include #include #include #include int main() { //choose a reasonably unique filename char path; sprintf(path, "./file-%d", getpid()); //create file close(creat(path, 0644)); //chown to some random UID/GID chown(path, 4444, 4444); //stat again (result can be seen in strace below) struct stat s; stat(path, &s); return 0; } Suppose that is main.c. Now I run the following within a fakeroot bash: $ gcc -o main main.c $ strace -v ./main ... creat("./file-10872", 0644) = 3 close(3) = 0 ... lchown("./file-10872", 84, 84) = -1 EPERM (Operation not permitted) stat("./file-10872", {st_dev=makedev(8, 3), st_ino=3932971, st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_nlink=1, st_uid=1001, st_gid=100, st_blksize=4096, st_blocks=0, st_size=0, st_atime=2015/10/31-20:12:07, st_mtime=2015/10/31-20:12:07, st_ctime=2015/10/31-20:12:07}) = 0 ... $ ls -l file-10872 -rw-r--r-- 1 4444 4444 0 31. Okt 20:12 file-10872 What can we see here? 1. The chown call failed with EPERM (Operation Not Permitted). 2. The subsequent stat shows st_uid=1001, st_gid=100 which is my real (non-fake) UID and GID (which is weird because, if I understand fakeroot correctly, it should at least show st_uid=0, st_gid=0). 3. The subsequent ls -l on the same file shows that the chown SUCCEEDED even though chown reported failure and the subsequent stat confirmed that. What the heck is going on here? Have I found a bug in fakeroot, or is this just a misunderstanding of how fakeroot works? (My fakeroot is version 1.20.2, and my system is Arch Linux with all updates.) **Update:** It has been correctly pointed out by Jonas Wielicki that strace works on the syscall level and thus is misleading since the results of the syscalls will be mangled by libfakeroot before being returned to the program itself. It turns out that after stat(path, &s), the struct stat s contains the new UID and GID. But it's still confusing that chown fails with EPERM.