-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 According to [EMAIL PROTECTED] on 2/15/2008 4:29 PM: | P> Is this just an academic worry, or were you really bitten by it? | | Yes. About once a year I do chown -R . file, thinking that -R meant | recursive, oops, I mean "reference"... never expecting it to "work if | it doesn't work", as with most commands, if it doesn't complain, then | it must have worked, and one doesn't look back, until a month later | when one notices some files didn't get written and were now lost due | to a permission problem.
On one hand, POSIX states that the owner is mandatory, and the fact that coreutils treats it as optional is an extension. So coreutils would be correct if it issued a warning when both owner and group are empty. On the other hand, 'chown current_owner file' is not necessarily a no-op - POSIX allows it to reset setgid bits, for example. So by extension, 'chown . file' is not necessarily a no-op, and warning when a real action might be taken seems odd. - -- Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well! Eric Blake [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (Cygwin) Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHtj1Y84KuGfSFAYARAlIAAKCZIJXCkYSnGYOh9/yBTjKaWDyPSgCg0HBe 4DQeiL73CIf03o+h6UWiGmU= =wU49 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
