Re: chown fails to ignore symbolic links during recursive directory transversals

[Jim Meyering]

Mark Brand <address@hidden> wrote:
> [This is a correction of my last e-mail that incorrectly referred to
> "chmod" instead of "chown" in a couple of places. This report is about
> chown. Sorry about that.]
>
> I hope I'm not making a fool of myself, but here we go:
>
> version: coreutils-5.2.1-3.rpm (from SuSE 9.2). Linux kernel 2.6.11.1.
> reiserfs.

Thanks for the report.
However, I cannot reproduce that behavior with unmodified coreutils-5.2.1
built and run on a Debian/GNU unstable system with Linux kernel 2.6.11.
Here's a small example:

  $ mkdir a b
  $ ln -s ../b a/sub
  $ sudo /bin/chown -R --verbose root a
  changed ownership of `a' to root
  changed ownership of `a/sub' to root
  $ ls -od a b
  drwxr-xr-x  2 root     60 Mar  9 19:36 a
  drwxr-xr-x  2 meyering 40 Mar  9 19:36 b

Maybe SuSE's version has changes that make it work differently?

Or (more likely) SuSE configured/built using a kernel/libc with
different chown/lchown semantics than what you're currently using.
That is one of the risks of using pre-compiled packages
(with configure-time run-tests) on newer versions of an OS.
Recompile it on your current system, and it may well work as
documented.