Re: chown dereference behaviour

[Jim Meyering]

Tim Waugh <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Jim,
>
> I don't know if you've seen this posting:
>
> http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/363335/2004-05-11/2004-05-17/0
>
> The complaint is that '--no-dereference' is the default behaviour of
> chown, while chmod never has that behaviour.
>
> What do you think about changing it?

Hi Tim,

Thanks for letting me know.
I will change it for the next release.

FYI, the POSIX chmod spec was never ambiguous.
However, the POSIX spec for chown(1) defers to chown(2), but
the behavior of chown(2) wrt symlinks has varied over the years
and wasn't even specified in earlier revisions of the POSIX spec.

On a related note, just a couple weeks ago I added an autoconf-time check
to determine which behavior chown(2) exhibits, so on most systems GNU
chown(1) will no longer have to resort to the open/fchown kludge.