Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 12:27:29 -0800 From: David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU> To: Tim Robbins <tjr@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: Alexander Leidinger <Alexander@Leidinger.net>, Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu>, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Asking for tester (small patch to chown(8)/chgrp(1)) Message-ID: <20021121202729.GA5473@HAL9000.homeunix.com> In-Reply-To: <20021121152158.A56883@dilbert.robbins.dropbear.id.au> References: <200211161129.gAGBTKHJ033124@lurza.secnetix.de> <20021117155159.44aeae5f.Alexander@Leidinger.net> <200211181807.gAII7u0w015430@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> <20021119182700.GA3030@HAL9000.homeunix.com> <20021120132743.5a46abbe.Alexander@Leidinger.net> <20021121152158.A56883@dilbert.robbins.dropbear.id.au>
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Thus spake Tim Robbins <tjr@FreeBSD.ORG>: > On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 01:27:43PM +0100, Alexander Leidinger wrote: > > > On Tue, 19 Nov 2002 10:27:00 -0800 > > David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU> wrote: > > > > > > > I'm concerned about the used character: "-r" is similiar to "-R" > > > > > > > > Yes, `-r' would be a very poor choice for the reason you state. > > > > > > Agreed, but the precedent has already been set by touch(1) and > > > truncate(1). If we're going to get it wrong some of the time, we > > > might as well be consistent about it. > > > > When we don't look at the fact that neither touch nor truncate operate > > recursivly... what about changing touch and truncate to allow the > > proposed -c (or -i) too and mark -r as deprecated (if it isn't covered > > by a standard)? > > I'd really rather that we didn't change this at all, even if it seems > "inconsistent". Changing it would just lead to more confusion. > > I am also against adding new options to chown to copy ownership from > existing files. > > Copy ownership: chown `stat -f%Su file1` file2 > Copy group: chgrp `stat -f%Sg file1` file2 > Copy both: chown `stat -f%Su:%Sg file1` file2 > > These could easily be made into shell functions or whatever... Admittedly it *is* creeping featurism, but there's already creeping featurism all over the place if you're going to be that strict about it. You might as well reimplement ls(1) as a shell script and remove 30 of its 33 documented options. I think -r is a specific case that happens to be useful and convenient for chown. Most of this discussion has been bogged down in the choice of option name, which is really silly. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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