Hi Joey, in #920118 [1], users of sponge complained about sponge not preserving file ownership of the output file. They argued, that sponge should behave (more) like 'tee' and shell redirections. And they interpreted the sentence
"sponge preserves the permissions of the output file if it already exists." from sponge(1) as 'sponge preserves permissions and ownership [...]'. After thinking about it several times, I am still ambiguous; thus, I am sending you two patches: 0001: an attempt to clarify the wording such that is becomes (more) clear that file ownership will not be preserved. and 0002: (might be squashed with 0001) a patch to sponge.c that introduces the attempt to restore the original file ownership opportunistically, neither handling nor even checking for errors. I am really curious about your comments, and whether you'd like to handle the complaints somehow. Looking forward for your reply. Thanks and kind regards, Nicolas [1]: https://bugs.debian.org/920118 Nicolas Schier (2): sponge: mention that ownership might not be preserved (Closes: #920118) sponge: preserve ownership if possible (Closes: #920118) sponge.c | 7 +++++++ sponge.docbook | 5 ++++- 2 files changed, 11 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) -- 2.24.0