Re: Bug in chown -- always kills suid/sgid bits.

Michael Stone (mstone@itri.loyola.edu)
Sun, 1 Jun 1997 12:18:21 -0400


Quoting Andi Gutmans (andi@vipe.technion.ac.il):
> When changing uid/gid taking off the s-bit is definetaly the RIGHT thing
> to do. It's much safer this way.
> ie. I'm against that second patch

I disagree; if you're root on a linux system, you can screw things up,
end of story--the kernel shouldn't attempt to prevent people from making
mistakes. Sometimes I need to change everything from one gid to another
gid but I still want s and it's annoying when I have to go and redo it.
BUT, in this case the behavior probably shouldn't change simply because
people expect it to work the way it does and it might cause problems if
it's changed.

Mike Stone