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Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1996 14:23:26 -0500 (CDT)
From: Guy Helmer <ghelmer@alpha.dsu.edu>
To: Jouke Dijkstra <jouke@epsilon.nl>
cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: [Fwd: skipper security check output]
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On Fri, 7 Jun 1996, Jouke Dijkstra wrote:

> Now this is a little extreme.. Read about who had a problem
> similar to this a little while ago, though he had it with only
> some files, not a whole bunch like this. 
> 
> Could someone please explain what's going on? This system is
> running 2.1 RELEASE.

>From a quick look at the message, it appears that the formatting of the
lines changed due to /bin/ls arbitrarily adjusting its format.  I've
noticed on my own systems, if I add/remove/change a setuid program, ls
seems to decide to adjust the format of a bunch of lines because
fewer/more columns are needed for the file size field, resulting in a
large changes report from diff :-( Because xargs is used, ls is probably
executed several times and as a result the format of only a section of the
setuid file list changes. 

For my own use on systems that don't have BSD's -T option to ls, I've been
working on a Perl replacement for /etc/security that includes its own
ls-style functionality (with a static format for output).  I haven't been
brave enough to try it out on my systems, yet :-)

Guy Helmer, Dakota State University Computing Services - ghelmer@alpha.dsu.edu