Re: Change chown to indicate if it cant do proper changes of file permissions

[Eric Blake]

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According to Roebe XXX on 6/21/2007 5:06 PM:
> Hi there, this is a very minor flaw, but i thought I'd report 
> it here in case someone is interested to adjust the behaviour 
> of chmod. It seems that chmod wont always report if it cant do 
> a change of file permission or if it failed.
> This lead us on IRC to waste some minutes when someone wasnt 
> able to chmod a FAT filesystem - obviously because FAT 
> doesnt allow chmod 777 for example :)
> 
> But I think it should report a message such as:
>   "Can not modify permission of FAT file."

Thanks for the report.  However, coreutils can only report an error if the
underlying chmod(2) syscall returns an error.  Are you on a Windows-based
system (such as cygwin), or on Linux?  Either way, this is something you'd
have to take up with the OS developers.  And don't expect much sympathy -
experience has shown that with lousy file systems (such as FAT), being
tolerant tends to result in a saner work flow than trying to report errors
for things that are flat out unsupported by the file system.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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