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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