URL:
<http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?28113>
Summary: chown silently fails to set uid/gid of ([ug]id_t)
-1
Project: GNU Core Utilities
Submitted by: hashproduct
Submitted on: Sat 28 Nov 2009 01:44:14 AM GMT
Category: None
Severity: 3 - Normal
Item Group: None
Status: None
Privacy: Public
Assigned to: None
Open/Closed: Open
Discussion Lock: Any
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Details:
chown(2) and related system calls treat ([ug]id_t) -1 as a special value
meaning "don't change this field". If chown(1) is called with a uid or gid of
([ug]id_t) -1 (typically 4294967295), it naively passes the value on to the
system call and, as a result, silently fails to do what the user asked. It
should issue an error message in this case. If the user had actually wanted
to not change a particular field, he/she would have used the appropriate
chown(1) syntax: "OWNER:" or ":GROUP".
Steps to reproduce:
$ touch test
$ chown 4294967295:4294967295 test
No error, but "test" still has the same ownership as before.
Tested with Fedora coreutils-7.2-4.fc11.x86_64 and with the latest coreutils
from the repository.
The problem came up at:
https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=1259202707.2009.382.camel%40mattlaptop2.local&forum_name=rsnapshot-discuss
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