On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 3:36 AM, Bruno Haible <br...@clisp.org> wrote: > > Unfortunately, having GNU 'ls' (and maybe later GNU 'chmod') use the > platform's native syntax for ACLs does not allow the user to use the > same commands on different platforms, and does not allow for platform > independent scripts.
I considered this. There are at least 3 different variants of ACL's (POSIX, NFSv4 and MacOS X) and they are generally incompatible. UMich created patches to acl/libacl so that you could set NFS4 acl's via getfacl/setfacl using POSIX ACL syntax [1]. However, they recommend that you don't use them due to the formats not being fully compatible. My motivation for writing this patch was to do away with the need for using Solaris ls (and eventually chmod). If we were to have some sort of platform-independent ACL format it would not be useful as replacement for Solaris' ls since it would invariably lack some Solaris ACL extension not common to all ACL formats. I also think that users of a specific platform expect to see output as documented by their platform. So for Solaris, this means the exact format specified by Solaris' ls(1) man page; likewise for Linux's getfacl(1) man page. [1] http://www.citi.umich.edu/projects/nfsv4/linux/ -- David
