info chown.chgrp/chmod

[Robert Supansic]

A  suggested change to these info pages. 

I just spent a day and a half trying to find out why I could not chown 
directories on a vfat 
filesystem.   The reason I could not, of course, is that Microsoft's 
filesystems do not support 
Unix file attributes -- something that some might feel should have been obvious 
to me.  But it 
was not, in part because of the rather sketchy and incomplete way file 
permissions and 
access control are traditionally explained in Unix documentation.

There was no mention of this limitation in the relevant sections of 
fileutils.info.  I think there 
should be.  More and more people are, like myself, building hybrid 
Windows/Linux 
networks.  All GNU/Linux documentation should fully discuss techniques for 
incorporating 
Microsoft's filesystems.   (More than that: bend over backwards.)

Some might argue, "Let the newbies figure it out for themselves!"   Others 
might say that 
omitting certain explanations is a way of assisting security.  The first 
argument is always the 
argument of an incipient priesthood, something which holds no interest for me.  
The second 
argument is bogus because you can figure it out if you take the time.  That is: 
not including it 
in the documentation accomplishes nothing but the waste of a lot of peoples' 
time.

Therefore, I suggest the following paragraph be added to the info pages for 
chown, chgrp, 
and chmod:

NOTE: This command will not work on the various Microsoft filesystems (msdos, 
vfat, fat16, 
fat32) because these filesystems do not support Unix-style file attributes.  
Access control on 
these filesystems must be accomplished in a different way.   See *Note vfat and 
msdos 
access control::.

On the "Changing File Attributes" page, I would add the option "vafat and msdos 
access 
control" which would point to this page of text:

vafat and msdos Access Control
**************************************

The various filesystems developed by Microsoft (msdos, vfat, fat16, fat32) do 
not support 
Unix-type file attributes.  Therefore, access to these filesystems must be 
controlled through:

1.      Careful selection of mount points or network shares.  For example, an 
msdos
        /home directory might have the subdirectories /user1, /user2, /user3, 
etc.  The
        network share /home/user1 restricts user1 to his/her own files.  The 
network
        share /home would give user1 access to all user subdirectories.

2.      Careful attention to the parameters used to mount the filesystem.  See 
the man
        page for "mount" for details on these filesystems.