Informix Error -381

-381 Cannot grant to someone who has granted you the same privilege before.

The privilege you are trying to grant is one that was first granted to you WITH GRANT OPTION. The user who made that grant is among the list of users in this present statement. For security reasons, you may not do a reciprocal grant. Rewrite the statement leaving out the name of your original patron. To see a list of the users to whom you may not grant, query systabauth as follows:

SELECT grantor FROM systabauth WHERE grantee = USER

Oninit® Troubleshooting Guidance

Reasons / Common Causes

-381 is a security guardrail against reciprocal grants: if user A granted a privilege to user B WITH GRANT OPTION, user B can't turn around and grant that same privilege back to user A — Informix blocks this circular pattern outright.

A GRANT statement naming the same user who originally granted the current user this privilege — the direct, only cause.
A privilege-management script generating grants in bulk, unaware that one of the target users is actually the original grantor of that same privilege.
Team/role rotation where privilege relationships have become tangled over time, making it easy to lose track of who originally granted what to whom.

Solutions / Resolution

Rewrite the GRANT statement excluding the original grantor's name, per the official guidance — the privilege is already theirs; granting it back to them is meaningless and blocked.
Identify who granted you this privilege, to understand and avoid the restricted relationship:
```
SELECT grantor FROM systabauth WHERE grantee = USER;
```
For bulk grant scripts, filter out any grantee who's also the current session's grantor for that same privilege before generating the statements.

Examples

Identifying the original grantor before granting

SELECT grantor FROM systabauth WHERE grantee = USER;
-- confirm the intended new grantee isn't in this list for the
-- specific privilege being granted

The disallowed reciprocal attempt

-- User A granted SELECT ON orders WITH GRANT OPTION to User B.
-- User B (now executing) attempts:
GRANT SELECT ON orders TO user_a;
-- -381: user_a already granted this privilege to the current user

Diagnostic Checks

Query systabauth for the current user's grantors on the specific table/privilege in question.
Compare the intended grantee against that grantor list before issuing the GRANT.

Related Errors / Related Topics

-299 — "Cannot grant permission to self." A related self-referential GRANT restriction, in this case direct rather than a two-hop reciprocal relationship.
-298 — "Cannot grant permission to public with grant option." Another GRANT-clause security restriction in the same privilege-management family.

Query systabauth to see who granted you the privilege in question before attempting to grant it onward — reciprocal grants back to your own grantor are always blocked.