Hello? Are we talking about the same operating system here? Who do
you think is allowed to change ownership of an inode? -- don't all
shout at once.
Admittedly POSIX.6 will make a difference to this, but it's hardly
insurmountable.
>It might be reasonable behaviour if there were ever a need to change the
>owner
>of a symlink. However, seeing as a symlink is a mere loophole in the
>namespace
>and has no function in itself, the owner, like its mode, is completely
>irrelevent.
symlink("/", "/tmp/symlink"). Now who can unlink("/tmp/symlink")?
>It seems to me that not following symlinks will be more surprising than
>following
>them, and therefore more likely to open holes.
It seems the reverse to me. Consider, for example, "chown -R
luser.users /home/luser", after it's been restored from tape. What
happens to the symlink to /etc/passwd that the user happens to have?
For what purposes do you call chown(2) anyway?
Please try to format text to lines of between about 50 and 70 columns
each.
-zefram