(Apologies to those, if any, who got an earlier version of this message.) Paul Eggert scripsit:
> The counterargument is that it's strange if a leading > zero changes the semantics of a number, as this is not what many > people expect. Fair enough. However, if the directory has mode 6755 and you do "chmod 2755 dir", the mode remains 6755. This violates the Law of Least Astonishment, I think. I had earlier thought that it doesn't matter, because setuid doesn't mean anything on directories in most *ix variants, but on FreeBSD it causes files created in the directory to be owned by the directory owner, analogously to setgid. See http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2004/perms.html for details. > Please see the thread rooted here: Thanks for the pointer. > If you read that root, by the way, you'll see that existing practice > is wildly different in this area. For example, on Solaris, > "chmod 2755 DIR" silently ignores the "2". Quite so. File modes are a mess, anyway. I suppose that on the whole stability trumps "correctness". -- As you read this, I don't want you to feel John Cowan sorry for me, because, I believe everyone [EMAIL PROTECTED] will die someday. http://www.ccil.org/~cowan --From a Nigerian-type scam spam _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
