Re: RFC: change chown *not* to look up numeric user/group names

[Pádraig Brady]

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.

Pádraig.