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Re: possible new feature for chmod
From: |
Paul Eggert |
Subject: |
Re: possible new feature for chmod |
Date: |
04 Aug 2003 16:42:53 -0700 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.3 |
Steve Summit <address@hidden> writes:
> "-rw-rw-r-" is acceptable as such a string, with (I gather) the
> interpretation "turn off rw for all, and rw for all, and r for
> all, and nothing for all".
I really like the basic idea, but I'm worried that the change as
written will confuse users quite a bit, due to the overloaded string.
Also, it doesn't strictly conform to POSIX, so it'd have to be
disabled if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, which is still more hassle.
Why not fix these problems by disambiguating the syntax? You can put
a new character in front of the new-format mode strings. E.g.,
chmod %-rw-rw-r-- file
This generalizes easily to the other commands.
If done cleerly enough, you could even combine the new syntax with
the old, e.g.:
chmod %-rw-rw-r--,a+x file
which would be equivalent to
chmod %-rwxrwxr-x,a+x file
except that it's easier to use the former in a shell script that
accepts 'ls' output. But perhaps this is _too_ fancy.