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Re: RFC: change chown *not* to look up numeric user/group names


From: Jim Meyering
Subject: Re: RFC: change chown *not* to look up numeric user/group names
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 12:38:19 +0200

Pádraig Brady <address@hidden> wrote:
> Jim Meyering wrote:
>> In <http://bugs.debian.org/393283>, Helge Hafting objected to the fact
>> that GNU chown performs a DB look-up for a numeric "user name", e.g., in
>> "chown 0 FILE".  chown does this deliberately, in case "0" is an actual
>> user *name*, that is associated potentially, with some numeric user ID.
>> That is the historical behavior, and it is required for POSIX conformance.
>>
>> Yes, that does sound silly, if not downright wrong.  Who actually uses
>> numeric user or group names these days?  Of the systems that still allow
>> such names, how many actually require or even use that capability?
>
> I can see this as being quite common.
> Consider a university server.
> In my uni all our accounts were 8 digit numbers.

Hi Pádraig,

Do you know if they still do that?

If numeric user names are still common enough, a compromise would be
to add a configure-time option to enable one behavior or the other,
and new options:

  --lookup-numeric
  --no-lookup-numeric

Or maybe -- easiest of all -- just don't change anything :-)

Jim




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