Re: mdate-sh vs. evil user/group names

[Eric Blake]

Ralf Wildenhues <Ralf.Wildenhues <at> gmx.de> writes:

> 
> Hi Eric,
> 
> Apologies for the delay.
> 
> * Eric Blake wrote on Thu, Mar 01, 2007 at 11:24:14PM CET:
> > mdate-sh fails miserably in the presence of user/group names that contain 
> > spaces (bad practice, but particularly common on cygwin).
> [...]
> > OK to apply this patch?
> 
> This patch looks ok for HEAD and branch-1-10, if `ls -n' works
> reasonably on Cygwin and MinGW.  (What are the numbers that are
> returned, BTW?)

This was what triggered my bug report:

$ \ls -l -d / .
drwxr-xr-x+ 14 eblake Domain Users 0 Mar 28 10:06 .
drwxrwx---+ 15 eblake Users        0 Mar 14 10:36 /
$ gnulib/build-aux/mdate-sh .
Users March Mar

And with the fix:

$ \ls -n -l -d / . 
drwxr-xr-x+ 14 22382 10513 0 Mar 28 10:06 .
drwxrwx---+ 15 22382   545 0 Mar 14 10:36 /
$ automake/lib/mdate-sh .
28 March 2007

So, on my machine, I am uid 22382, and a member of both groups 10513 and 545 
(and yes, cygwin is a bit odd in that / is not typically owned by uid/gid 0).

> 
> It would be even better if it came with a test to ensure correct
> functioning of the script, as far as portably possible.  For example,
> it could test that three words are output, and that day and year are
> numeric.  (As usual, I can write the test, but if you do it, then it
> will be done more quickly 

I'll see what I can come up with, but it may be a few days before I have time 
to focus on it (I'm about to head out of town for the weekend).

-- 
Eric Blake