On Sat, 21 Dec 1996 17:44:02 -0500 (EST)  der Mouse wrote:

> Is it supposed to work this way?  It produces some very odd-looking
> failure messages from chmod(1).

Talk about coincidence; I found this yesterday.

I would suspect it is historical from the time when the sticky bit was
honoured for executables, and only root was allowed to specify which
executables could reside in valuable swap space.

I would think the restriction could now go unless someone has some
useful semantics planned for the sticky bit, which I hope they
haven't!

Giles