"O'Connor, Russell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > The CVS change log for revision 1.6 of gzip.c says "Invoke chmod before > chown, to close a race condition." But the change actually moves chown > before chmod.
Sorry, the change log is wrong. I'll fix it. > With chown before chmod, if you don't own the file, you > won't be able to change the permissions, and they will be left at 0600, > and gzip reports "Operation not permitted". Is this intentional? Yes. The problem is that on many hosts, if you chown a file there is a side effect that chmods it as well. So you must chown before chmoding. On most systems, if you have enough privileges to chown a file, you can also chmod it afterwards, so it's not a problem. On systems where you can give files away you will have problems, true. The usual workaround is "Don't do that".
