Bugtraq mailing list archives
Re: Curious fileutils/coreutils behaviour.
From: Nicolas Rachinsky <list () rachinsky de>
Date: Fri, 14 May 2004 23:13:35 +0200
* David Malone <dwmalone () cnri dit ie> [2004-05-13 17:49 +0100]:
Solaris, AIX, and FreeBSD all seem to have less suprising behaviour for chown and chmod and provide a "-h" flag for chowning a symlink rather than its target. Fileutils also has a "-h" flag, but it is the default for chown, so you need to say "--dereference" to get it to operate on the target. (Though there seems to be a stat/lstat bug in coreutils 5.2.1. If you run this as root: ln -s b a ; touch b ; chown dwmalone a ; chown --dereference dwmalone a then b ends up owned by root rather than dwmalone). While this choice of default isn't clearly wrong, I found it surprising.
This behaviour violates the single unix specification if I read it correctly. There is explicitly stated that chown should behave like chown(), which should -- unlike lchown() -- change the file a symlink points to. Nicolas
Current thread:
- Curious fileutils/coreutils behaviour. David Malone (May 14)
- Re: Curious fileutils/coreutils behaviour. Nicolas Rachinsky (May 14)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- RE: Curious fileutils/coreutils behaviour. Michael Wojcik (May 14)
- Re: Curious fileutils/coreutils behaviour. David Malone (May 14)
- Re: Curious fileutils/coreutils behaviour. Michael Shigorin (May 15)
- Re: Curious fileutils/coreutils behaviour. Luciano Miguel Ferreira Rocha (May 15)
- Re: Curious fileutils/coreutils behaviour. Martin (May 15)
- Re: Curious fileutils/coreutils behaviour. David Malone (May 14)