On Sun, Nov 08, 2009 at 09:21:14PM +0300, Michael Tokarev wrote:
> A good one. It appears that I quite something changed since I last looked
> at this. No, I didn't test it because I remember it's how things worked
> before. But that was long before.... ;)
>
> As of coreutils-6.0, coreutils supports *at syscalls (incl. fchownat),
> and always specifying AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW. My system eve had strace that
> does not understand these!.. ;)
>
> See the NEWS file in coreutils package. In particular, this:
>
> -----------
> * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
[...]
Well, chown's link-following behavior seems to also potentially
differ between normal and -R modes. At least as far back as:
coreutils (5.2.1-1)
[...]
chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
[...]
Wed, 14 Jul 2004 06:13:38 -0400
Browsing around a Debian sarge/3.1 system I still have on hand (with
coreutils 5.2.1-2 installed), the chown manpage states:
The following options modify how a hierarchy is traversed when
the -R option is also specified. If more than one is specified,
only the final one takes effect.
-H if a command line argument is a symbolic link to a
directory, traverse it
-L traverse every symbolic link to a directory encountered
-P do not traverse any symbolic links (default)
I don't think I have any woody/3.0 servers left around, so I can't
easily test back any farther than that, but I retested and confirmed
sarge/3.1 chown from coreutils doesn't follow symbolic links by
default any more than on present-day sid (repeated the same tests).
I don't doubt that at some time in the past chown probably did
follow by default, but even though I've been a GNU/Linux user since
'92 my personal memory doesn't seem to go back nearly that far... ;)
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