chown and symbolic links

[Pavel Machek]

Hi!

> > : ~2 years ago I was able to chown a symbolic link. Now chown
> > : modifies the library or any other file the symbolic links
> > : points to.
> >
> > It seems I answed this question some time ago.
> > I guess you are using Linux with 2.2+ kernel now and you used 2.0
> > kernel ~2 years ago. There is NOTES section from chown (2) man page.
> 
> Thank you for figuring this out!
> 
> > : How do I get the old behavior ?
> >
> > There is a dirty hack below.
> 
> It's funny that some people call their dirty hacks "patches" and you are
> calling your patch a "dirty hack".

This seems tdirty hack to me.

local_lchown should be added, and lchown should be added to all
targets... Because .. How do you get functionality of chown() if chown
is turned into lchown?

> This is basically what the "chown" command does in GNU fileutils, except
> that it returns ENOSYS on symlinks if lchown is not available and chown is
> not guaranteed to work as lchown.
> 
> It's already the second patch in the last month that tries to use the VFS
> level to give the traditional libc functions the "smartness" of the
> traditional UNIX utilities, such as "ln" that can link into a directory
> and "chown" that works on symlinks.

I think this is bad. I do not like smartness such as this. It is
likely to break stuff in future.
								Pavel
-- 
The best software in life is free (not shareware)!		Pavel
GCM d? s-: !g p?:+ au- a--@ w+ v- C++@ UL+++ L++ N++ E++ W--- M- Y- R+