I just downloaded and untar'd the latest ncurses tarball ( at
http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/ncurses/ncurses-5.7.tar.gz ) and noticed that
all the files are mode 444. Yes, it's very easy to work around....but I
am curious to know why it is packaged up like this. Is there a specific
reason the files are all read-only? Thanks for your help,