Re: chmod octal form of sgid/suid removal fails

[Paul Eggert]

John Cowan <address@hidden> writes:

> Well and good, but it seems to me that writing an explicit 0 actually
> does make an explicit request.

This topic came up when I first added that feature, and originally I
agreed with you, but others did not and their arguments were
persuasive.  The counterargument is that it's strange if a leading
zero changes the semantics of a number, as this is not what many
people expect.  Please see the thread rooted here:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2006-07/msg00124.html

If you read that root, by the way, you'll see that existing practice
is wildly different in this area.  For example, on Solaris,
"chmod 2755 DIR" silently ignores the "2".