* David Malone <dwmalone@xxxxxxxxxxx> [2004-05-13 17:49 +0100]: > Solaris, AIX, and FreeBSD all seem to have less suprising behaviour > for chown and chmod and provide a "-h" flag for chowning a symlink > rather than its target. Fileutils also has a "-h" flag, but it is > the default for chown, so you need to say "--dereference" to get > it to operate on the target. (Though there seems to be a stat/lstat > bug in coreutils 5.2.1. If you run this as root: > ln -s b a ; touch b ; chown dwmalone a ; chown --dereference dwmalone a > then b ends up owned by root rather than dwmalone). > > While this choice of default isn't clearly wrong, I found it > surprising. This behaviour violates the single unix specification if I read it correctly. There is explicitly stated that chown should behave like chown(), which should -- unlike lchown() -- change the file a symlink points to. Nicolas
