>>Is it possible to have something along the lines of >>ME_{READ,WRITE,EXECUTE,DELETE,CD} to say if, as the user the program >>is running as, you can perform these actions? That strikes me as >>rather useful. (Alternately, could we have a field indicating if >>the current user is OWNER, GROUP, SYSTEM, or OTHER to this file? >>Gives you pretty much the same info.) > > Sure, that works, and I can see it being as useful as the other > permission testing stuff. (Which, arguably, is actually really really > useless, but that's a separate issue. We could, I suppose,
Well, not *completely* useless... things like -w have their uses in e.g. - warning the user before trying an operation - "ls -l" or any other textual representation of "rights" - checking the filesystem "rights" against some description of how things should be But for things like -r "file" && open(FH, "file") they are of rather dubious value. > unconditionally return 'true' for all of these...)