Re: chown xxx.yyy, POSIX, and LSB

[Jim Meyering]

Hi Tim,

Tim Waugh <address@hidden> wrote:
> In coreutils-5.2.0 I see that the dotted user.group form of chown(1)
> is now rejected unless an environment variable is set, and I
> understand that POSIX specifies that ':' is the separator.
>
> Unfortunately, the Linux Standard Base specifies that '.' may be used
> in addition.

Let's hope the LSB is flexible on this, if they haven't
already corrected things for the next version.

> Is there any chance of making this new rejection behaviour dependent
> on POSIXLY_CORRECT (i.e. having the old behaviour remain the default
> in its absence), rather than only providing the old behaviour with
> _POSIX2_VERSION=199209?

It wouldn't make sense to tie chown's accepting `.' in place of `:'
to POSIXLY_CORRECT, since it would make chown interpret a.b as username
`a' and group `b' while POSIX requires that it be interpreted
as username `a.b'.

So I guess it'd be more like POSIXLY_INCORRECT :)