Re: chown should catch null owner:group

[Linda Walsh]

What does it do?  You said it reset somebody's boss's access so he could not 
read some file.  Was this hyperbole?  When I just tried it on a local directory, 
"chown -R ." gave an error, while "chown -R : ."
appeared to do nothing on linux, under cygwin, it did reset 'group' id's
from "null" (uid=-1) to my default group, but didn't affect other groups.
But I haven't found a linux case where it does something, yet... :-)


address@hidden wrote:
> P> Is this just an academic worry, or were you really bitten by it?
>
> Yes. About once a year I do chown -R . file, thinking that -R meant
> recursive, oops, I mean "reference"... never expecting it to "work if
> it doesn't work", as with most commands, if it doesn't complain, then
> it must have worked, and one doesn't look back, until a month later
> when one notices some files didn't get written and were now lost due
> to a permission problem.