*BSD News Article 20597


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs
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From: peter@taronga.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: bug with ufs file creation
Organization: Taronga Park BBS
References: <CCyLF6.n6@kithrup.com> <322@rook.ukc.ac.uk> <CCzu78.DJD@kithrup.com> <328@rook.ukc.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <CD0AnI.1rM@taronga.com>
Date: Tue, 7 Sep 1993 23:01:51 GMT
Lines: 22

In article <328@rook.ukc.ac.uk>, D.A.Clear <dac@ukc.ac.uk> wrote:
>	tikki% groups
>	staff wheel
>	tikki% ls -ldg .
>	drwxr-xr-x  2 dac  games  512 Sep  7 20:02 .
>	tikki% touch foo
>	tikki% ls -lg foo
>	-rw-r--r--  1 dac  games  0 Sep  7 20:04 foo
>	tikki% chmod 2755 foo
>	chmod: foo: Operation not permitted

That doesn't make sense. I can see using the directory group to choose
which of *your* groups the file should be in, but what's the point of
creating a file in a group you're not a member of by default?

I suppose this is all part of the broken BSD chown semantics, inherited
from the days of the Berkeley Fascist File System (not a dig... that's
what it was called) with only group masters able to chown files owned by
members of a group.

I think that this whole area: groups, chown, quotas, and so on needs to
be reconsidered. It's become a big mess.