On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 06:29:50PM +1200, Greg Ewing wrote: > Steven D'Aprano wrote: > >But it doesn't matter: regular users can call chown -R: > > Only if you're not actually telling it to change anything.
That's not correct. Look closely at my example: the file ownership recursively changed from steve.steve to steve.users. > % ls -l foo.txt > -rw-r--r-- 1 greg users 1 29 May 18:19 foo.txt > % chown greg foo.txt > % chown fred foo.txt > chown: foo.txt: Operation not permitted And yet Python provides a chown function despite this alleged uselessness. Maybe it's not quite so useless as you think? Here's a thought... maybe sometimes people actually do run Python scripts as root? And as the comments to this Stackoverflow post explain: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/119229/can-not-chown-a-file-from-my-user-to-another-user the ability for unprivileged users to change ownership to another user is configurable under POSIX. > So you have to be root in order to do anything *useful* > with it. Fortunately that is not correct, but even if it were, that's no reason to not allow chown to apply recursively. -- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
