[sent privately by mistake] On Mi, 22 mai 13, 19:48:37, Beco wrote: > Dear users, > > I'm astonished by this (maybe I'm naive and I'm missing something). > > Yesterday as root I saved a file skel.bashrc in my /home/beco user, owned > by root, group root. > > Today I edited it, logged as beco, and vi told me "warning, read only!". I > edited anyway, just to test, and saved with :w! > > After that I checked the file and it has changed to owner beco, group beco. > > How is that possible?
Check this out: amp@sid:~$ sudo touch tmp/testfile amp@sid:~$ ls -l tmp/testfile -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 23 01:58 tmp/testfile amp@sid:~$ rm tmp/testfile rm: remove write-protected regular empty file `tmp/testfile'? y amp@sid:~$ ls -l tmp/testfile ls: cannot access tmp/testfile: No such file or directory amp@sid:~$ AFAIR it has to do with the fact that you own the directory and rm just deletes the directory entry for that file. With vi(m) (and I assume most other editors) this works because when you edit a file you don't work on the actual file, but on a copy of it. When you save it vi(m) replaces the original file with the changed copy (effectively rm/rename), because in case of a crash/power failure/etc. you still have the original and hopefully even most of the changed file (depending on autosave settings). Hope this explains, Andrei -- If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. (Albert Einstein)
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
