What's up with chown.c doing a chmod?

[Rob Landley]

In coreutils/chown.c, why doed fileAction call chmod(fileName, 
statbuf->st_mode);  Isn't statbuf what the file _already_ has?  Does the file 
need some kind of reassurance?  (Attaboy, file!)

I'm confused.  Is chmod corrupting the permissions when we didn't ask it to?  
Why is the code doing that?

Rob
(Off fixing bug 603...)
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I do not think it means what you think it means.