Re: chown, cpio: proposed change for userspec handling of USER:

[Eric Blake]

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According to Bob Proulx on 12/2/2009 7:25 PM:
> I would prefer not to remove this very useful feature.  Of course I
> find it useful because I use it quite often.  But I understand that if
> it isn't standard then we should remove it from the tool.

POSIX doesn't specify it (it only specifies 'chown user' and 'chown
user:group', not 'chown user:').  Therefore, a POSIX-conformant app will
never call chown with that syntax in the first place, and we can make it
behave however we'd like.  Since our current behavior is a pure extension,
and has had several people claim it is useful, and since changing it now
after years of providing it can be viewed as a regression, I see no reason
to remove it from coreutils.

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

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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