Running chown in a Folder Action

Question

When I drop a file into my Drop Box from another machine (Mac or Windows) on my network, the file's owner is set to 'nobody'. I would like the owner to be set to my user name 'steve'. I wrote the following script and assigned it as a Folder Action to my Drop Box:
<pre style="
font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;
font-size: 10px;
margin: 0px;
padding: 5px;
border: 1px solid #000000;
width: 720px;
color: #000000;
background-color: #FFEE80;
overflow: auto;" title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor">on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving these_items
try
set the item_count to the number of items in these_items
tell application "Finder"
repeat with this_item in these_items
set this_path to the quoted form of the POSIX path of this_item
set this_script to ("/usr/sbin/chown steve " & this_path)
--display dialog this_script buttons {"OK"}
do shell script this_script user name "root" password "my root password" with administrator privileges
end repeat
end tell
on error error_message number error_number
if the error_number is not -128 then
tell application "Finder"
activate
display dialog error_message buttons {"Cancel"} default button 1 giving up after 120
end tell
end if
end try
end adding folder items to</pre>
When I drop a file into the folder, I get the error message "Finder got an error: A privilege violation occurred." (If I uncomment the "display dialog" line, the shell command looks correct.)
Is there a way to run chown from a Folder Action?
What I really want to know is if there's a way to make me the owner of any files dropped into my Drop Box but that's not an AppleScript question.

Answer 1

Can you confirm that you have the root user enabled for login? For security reasons (as the PW is stored in the script), I would recommend replacing
do shell script this_script user name "root" password "my root password" with administrator privileges
with
do shell script this_script user name "your Admin shortname" password the_password with administrator privileges
at the beginning of the script, place this line:
set the_password to text returned of (display dialog "Enter Administrator Password" default answer "" with hidden answer)
as there is no reason to run the script with root as you are. A regular admin account will suffice. The "with administrator privileges" is equivalent to running a command with "sudo".