On Wed, 2016-08-03 at 10:11 +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote: > * Linus Torvalds <torva...@linux-foundation.org> wrote: > > [ So I answered similarly to another patch, but I'll just re-iterate > > and change the subject line so that it stands out a bit from the > > millions of actual patches ] > > > > On Tue, Aug 2, 2016 at 1:42 PM, Pavel Machek <pa...@ucw.cz> wrote: > > > Everyone knows what 0644 is, but noone can read S_IRUSR | S_IWUSR | > > > S_IRCRP | S_IROTH (*). Please don't do this. > > Absolutely. It's *much* easier to parse and understand the octal > > numbers, while the symbolic macro names are just random line noise and > > hard as hell to understand. You really have to think about it. > > > > So we should rather go the other way: convert existing bad symbolic > > permission bit macro use to just use the octal numbers. > In addition to that I'd love to have something even easier to read, a few > common > variants of the permissions field of 'ls -l' pre-defined. I did some quick > grepping, and collected the main variants that are in use: > > PERM_r________ 0400 > PERM_r__r_____ 0440 > PERM_r__r__r__ 0444
[etc] While the proposed PERM_ variants are easily read, using a single style instead of 2+ incompatible symbolic styles makes treewide misuse identification via grep style tools easier.
