A suggested change to these info pages.
I just spent a day and a half trying to find out why I could not chown directories on
a vfat
filesystem. The reason I could not, of course, is that Microsoft's filesystems do
not support
Unix file attributes -- something that some might feel should have been obvious to me.
But it
was not, in part because of the rather sketchy and incomplete way file permissions and
access control are traditionally explained in Unix documentation.
There was no mention of this limitation in the relevant sections of fileutils.info. I
think there
should be. More and more people are, like myself, building hybrid Windows/Linux
networks. All GNU/Linux documentation should fully discuss techniques for
incorporating
Microsoft's filesystems. (More than that: bend over backwards.)
Some might argue, "Let the newbies figure it out for themselves!" Others might say
that
omitting certain explanations is a way of assisting security. The first argument is
always the
argument of an incipient priesthood, something which holds no interest for me. The
second
argument is bogus because you can figure it out if you take the time. That is: not
including it
in the documentation accomplishes nothing but the waste of a lot of peoples' time.
Therefore, I suggest the following paragraph be added to the info pages for chown,
chgrp,
and chmod:
NOTE: This command will not work on the various Microsoft filesystems (msdos, vfat,
fat16,
fat32) because these filesystems do not support Unix-style file attributes. Access
control on
these filesystems must be accomplished in a different way. See *Note vfat and msdos
access control::.
On the "Changing File Attributes" page, I would add the option "vafat and msdos access
control" which would point to this page of text:
vafat and msdos Access Control
**************************************
The various filesystems developed by Microsoft (msdos, vfat, fat16, fat32) do not
support
Unix-type file attributes. Therefore, access to these filesystems must be controlled
through:
1. Careful selection of mount points or network shares. For example, an msdos
/home directory might have the subdirectories /user1, /user2, /user3, etc. The
network share /home/user1 restricts user1 to his/her own files. The network
share /home would give user1 access to all user subdirectories.
2. Careful attention to the parameters used to mount the filesystem. See the man
page for "mount" for details on these filesystems.
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