... doesn't seem to work.

Several of Debian's dpkg utilities have code like the following:

#! /usr/bin/perl
open(Y,"> file.new") ||
    die("open new substvars file \`file.new' failed");
chown(0, 0, "file.new") ||
    die("chown of \`file.new' failed");
close(Y)

which when executed by root in a coda file system dies as follows:

chown of `file.new' failed at ./oops.pl line 4.

unless file.new previously existed.

I seem to recall this is expected behavior (but can't find the
citation).  If so, is this a restriction of Coda, a bug in Coda, or a
bug in the Perl code?

Steve