Thanks for the report. But what you are reporting is expected behavior. This is not a bug in chown or other utility.
Adam Hayes wrote: > I (accidentally) created a file in the working directory named > "--exclude". When I ran > chown [username] * > in that directory, it gave an error: > chown: unrecognized option `--exclude' Yes. That is because the shell expands wildcards (e.g. "*") characters before invoking the command. The command doesn't have any way of knowing if the result was a wildcard expansion from the shell or an explicit command from the user. They are both simply characters in the program argument list. > It seems to me that chown should not think that something in the directory > is a command option. What you are asking for is not possible. For example if you create a file name "--verbose" and then tried to use 'rm' to remove the file and rm refused to remove it because it is also a command line option you would have the same problem in reverse. If you want to avoid a program argument being interpreted as an option then you must tell the command that you are done passing options. chown USER:GROUP -- --exclude Or prefix the filename with ./ to avoid it starting with the --option prefix. chown USER:GROUP ./--exclude These rules apply to all of the utilities. Hope this helps, Bob _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
