backwards recursive chowning

[Evan McNabb]

I guess this is a bug report or feature request, depending on how you
look at it. I searched through the list archives but didn't see this
topic in there; if I missed it please forgive me (I hate it when people
post redundant info on the lists I'm on).

Last month I got a new laptop, installed Linux, and "tweaked" my system
how I liked it. I copied over my personal files in my home directory and
chowned them all to me. Then I realized that my '.' files still needed
to be chowned so I made the mistake of typing "chown -R emcnabb:users
.*". It took a while to execute so I thought that the i/o on my laptop
was bad; it turns out it just had a lot of files to chown. :-) I've been
using Linux for quite some time so I should have realized what was going
to happen, but it didn't even cross my mind until after I did it. I
ended up having to reinstall my system because everything was owned by
me. :-)

It turns out that lots of my friends have done the same thing (so this
is a request from several people). Is there any possibility to get all
the programs in coreutils (chown, chmod, chgrp, etc) to not have
backwards recursion (i.e.  that follow '..')? I know rm doesn't do this
any more, and that has saved many people's systems. I don't know of
anyone who has ever needed this functionality, and I don't think any
other programs depend on it.

Once again, this is a feature request so feel free to do what you feel
is right. I'll never make this mistake again, but I'm sure as more and
more 'newbies' use Linux they will. Thanks for the hard work. Long live
the command line. :-)

-Evan

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       Evan McNabb: <address@hidden> <address@hidden>
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             System Administrator, CS Department, BYU
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