Re: chown should catch null owner:group

[Eric Blake]

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According to Linda Walsh on 2/18/2008 11:34 AM:

Please don't top-post - on this list, we prefer to see replies in context.

| What does it do?  You said it reset somebody's boss's access so he could
| not read some file.  Was this hyperbole?  When I just tried it on a
| local directory, "chown -R ." gave an error, while "chown -R : ."
| appeared to do nothing on linux, under cygwin, it did reset 'group' id's
| from "null" (uid=-1) to my default group, but didn't affect other groups.
| But I haven't found a linux case where it does something, yet... :-)

Hmm.  The info documentation states:

OWNER`:'
~     If a colon but no group name follows OWNER, that user is made the
~     owner of the files and the group of the files is changed to
~     OWNER's login group.

`:'
~     If only a colon is given, or if NEW-OWNER is empty, neither the
~     owner nor the group is changed.

But you claim that using just `:' (or it's obsolete synonym `.') resulted
in changing the group to the default login group, rather than being a
no-op.  I'm wondering whether this is a cygwin porting bug or an upstream
documentation bug.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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