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[bug #28113] chown silently fails to set uid/gid of ([ug]id_t) -1


From: Matt McCutchen
Subject: [bug #28113] chown silently fails to set uid/gid of ([ug]id_t) -1
Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2009 01:44:15 +0000
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091105 Fedora/3.5.5-1.fc11 Firefox/3.5.5

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?28113>

                 Summary: chown silently fails to set uid/gid of ([ug]id_t)
-1
                 Project: GNU Core Utilities
            Submitted by: hashproduct
            Submitted on: Sat 28 Nov 2009 01:44:14 AM GMT
                Category: None
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: None
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any

    _______________________________________________________

Details:

chown(2) and related system calls treat ([ug]id_t) -1 as a special value
meaning "don't change this field".  If chown(1) is called with a uid or gid of
([ug]id_t) -1 (typically 4294967295), it naively passes the value on to the
system call and, as a result, silently fails to do what the user asked.  It
should issue an error message in this case.  If the user had actually wanted
to not change a particular field, he/she would have used the appropriate
chown(1) syntax: "OWNER:" or ":GROUP".

Steps to reproduce:
$ touch test
$ chown 4294967295:4294967295 test
No error, but "test" still has the same ownership as before.

Tested with Fedora coreutils-7.2-4.fc11.x86_64 and with the latest coreutils
from the repository.

The problem came up at:
https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=1259202707.2009.382.camel%40mattlaptop2.local&forum_name=rsnapshot-discuss




    _______________________________________________________

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