Hello, It's quite common to see code that calls test -x to check whether the x bit was disabled on a file, before trying to execute it.
That does not work on the Hurd for uid 0: # touch foo # ls -l foo -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 24 21:31 foo # [ -x foo ] && echo erf erf # ./foo -bash: ./foo: Permission denied because in fshelp_access(), as soon as user->uids contains 0, everything is permitted, thus making access() always return X_OK... What POSIX says is `New implementations are discouraged from returning X_OK unless at least one execution permission bit is set.' Now, I can not remember about executability in the Hurd: can it happen that something -x may actually be executable? If not, shouldn't we change our behavior? Samuel
