``chown -h owner symlink'' did not set the symlink's owner
if the file the symlink points to already had that owner:
# ls -l alink afile
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody ru 0 May 31 14:14 afile
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root ru 5 May 31 14:14 alink -> afile
# ./chown -h -v nobody alink
# ls -l alink afile
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody ru 0 May 31 14:14 afile
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root ru 5 May 31 14:14 alink -> afile
Similarly for chgrp(1) and chmod(1).
This is required by symlink(7), ``Commands not traversing a file tree''
subsection, third paragraph:
: It is important to realize that this rule includes commands which may
: optionally traverse file trees, e.g. the command ``chown file'' is
: included in this rule, while the command ``chown -R file'' is not.
For chown(8) and chgrp(1), this is also is compliance with the latest
POSIX 1003.1-200x draft.
MFC after: 1 week
track.
The Id line is normally at the bottom of the main comment block in the
man page, separated from the rest of the manpage by an empty comment,
like so;
.\" $Id$
.\"
If the immediately preceding comment is a @(#) format ID marker than the
the $Id$ will line up underneath it with no intervening blank lines.
Otherwise, an additional blank line is inserted.
Approved by: bde
default, at least in BSD. This used to be automatic, because chown(2)
didn't follow symlinks. When chown(2) was changed to follow symlinks
in BSD4.4, chown(8) was changed to not follow symlinks by default.
The previous commit broke this. The first victim was bsd.prog.mk,
which uses a plain chown in an attempt to change the ownership of the
symlinks to `dm' in /usr/games. This fails when it is done before
dm is installed, or messes up the ownership of dm if dm is installed.
Unfixed problems:
1. When lchown(2) was implemented, chown(8) wasn't changed to implement
the historical behaviour of changing ownership of symlinks. I'm not
sure if it should have been. The -HLP options give more complete
control, but they unfortunately don't apply unless the -R option is
specified (a problem shared with other commands, e.g., cp; I guess
we're supposed to use -R even for non-recursive traversals).
2. If we implement the historical behaviour, then -h would become a no-op
and should be left undocumented.
3. The man page suggests that without option -h, all symlinks (to files
specified in the command line?) are followed. It's not clear what
"the file" is. These bugs were introduced when -h was documented.
4. The correct interaction of -h with the other flags is not clear.
first check for a `.' and then for `:' as a delimiter.
Usernames with a dot will fail.
# chown r.r:bin /tmp/bla
chown: r:bin: illegal group name
Fix: first check for a `:' and then for a `.'
This will make a number of things easier in the future, as well as (finally!)
avoiding the Id-smashing problem which has plagued developers for so long.
Boy, I'm glad we're not using sup anymore. This update would have been
insane otherwise.
