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Date:      Fri, 5 Jul 2002 11:33:24 -0500
From:      David Syphers <dsyphers@uchicago.edu>
To:        Stephen Hilton <nospam@hiltonbsd.com>, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: chown syntax changed "POLA"
Message-ID:  <200207051133.24511.dsyphers@uchicago.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20020705104944.5556b3b9.nospam@hiltonbsd.com>
References:  <20020705104944.5556b3b9.nospam@hiltonbsd.com>

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On Friday 05 July 2002 10:49 am, Stephen Hilton wrote:
>
> COMPATIBILITY
>  Previous versions of the chown utility used the dot (``.'') character to
>  distinguish the group name.  This has been changed to be a colon (``:'')
>  character so that user and group names may contain the dot character.

> Wow, this really caught me by surprise!  Time to review and update 
> my shell scripts.
> 
> Am i correct in assuming that this will be the "defacto standard" 
> for chown in FreeBSD 4.7 and 5 ?, and how about script 
> compatability across different UNIX's ?

According to the manpages at http://www.freebsd.org/docs.html#man, the use of 
the colon instead of the dot is standard in recent versions of Solaris, SuSE, 
RedHat, NetBSD, and indeed in 4.4BSD Lite2.  I didn't even know you could use 
a dot, until now  :)

-David

-- 
Everyone who believes in telekinesis, raise my hand...

Astronomy and Astrophysics Center
The University of Chicago

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