Re: chmod RFE

[Dave Yost]

At 10:28 AM +0100 2005-07-16, James Youngman wrote:
>On Fri, Jul 15, 2005 at 12:18:35PM -0700, Dave Yost wrote:
>> The chmod on Mac OS X (which is probably same as one of the BSDs) has
>> better functionality and a much better man page.  GNU should catch up.
>>
>> Dave
>
>Dave,
>
>Thanks for your interest.  Maybe you're right.  Please explain in more
>detail why you think that the MacOS X implementation of chmod(1) is
>superior to the GNU coreutils implementation.  If you can be specific,
>and we agree, perhaps we can improve things.
>
>As regards documentation, it is the GNU project's policy to prefer
>Texinfo documentation for its software rather than nroff manual pages.
>You may regard that policy as right, or you may regard it as wrong,
>but that's the policy.
>
>Regards,
>James.

The compelling examples for me is this:

  chmod g=u,o=u-w foo

  set the group bits equal to the user bits.

  set the other bits equal to the user bits,
  but clear the other write bit.

Also, the man page is much more detailed and has examples.

It would seem to me to be a good idea to start a project to evaluate all the 
features of the various BSD versions of core-utils for possible adoption and 
thereafter to track changes continuously.

Thanks

Dave