Re: chown should catch null owner:group

[Jim Meyering]

address@hidden wrote:
> LW> "chown -R ." gave an error
> Try
> DJ> chown -R . file
> which should emit
> "Holmes, you think you are changing the owner of FILE to be the same
> as the owner of ".", but you have actually typed something else (-R
> means recursive) which is an absolute error, about which the new
> improved chown command will hereby exit 1".

I think it makes sense to diagnose a spec of "." as invalid.
If you want the no-op spec, you can use ":", and as Dan points
out, otherwise it's too easy for chown to interpret an intended
FILE argument of "." as a spec.

Any scripts that rely on "chown . FILE" succeeding should
have been changed long ago.

Does anyone want to work on this?