Quick ".." question

[Pavel Roskin]

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003, Pete Zieba wrote:

> Hi.
>
> Just wondering what doing a chown on ".." really does. I would interpret
> this is acting on the directory you are inside, but it seems that
> whatever is set stays on just "..", leaving the directory I am in
> unaffected. Do I just not understand the filesystem, or is there another
> reason for this behavior?

Actually, ".." is the directory above current, so if you are in /home/foo
and you are changing permissions on "..", you are changing permissions of
/home, not /home/foo.

That's fully consistent with the standard filesystem hierarchy in UNIX
(and POSIX in general), DOS, Windows and OS/2.

"." refers to the current directory.  Midnight Commander doesn't show it
because it's rarely useful for interactive navigation.

> I cannot subscribe to the mailing list as I don't have a mail account
> which will let me store any reasonable amount of mail. If any replies
> could also be sent to my address the help would be greatly appreciated.
> Thanks!

That's why GNU Mailman allows you to subscribe but disable mail delivery.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin