chmod and UNIX permissions
Tom Buskey
tom at buskey.name
Thu Apr 10 13:26:44 EDT 2003
pll at lanminds.com wrote:
>I recently noted some bizarre behavior on Solaris:
>
> chmod 6755 foo/ == chmod 4755 foo/
>
>This doesn't make *any* sense to me at all! Granted, it's
>been abut 3 years or more since I've spent any real time on this OS,
>but I didn't think my memory was *that* bad. So I checked the man
>page. Sure enough:
>
> Note that the setgid bit cannot be set (or cleared) in abso-
> lute mode; it must be set (or cleared) in symbolic mode
> using g+s (or g-s).
>
>This is on Solaris [2.5.]8/SunOS 5.8. I know that you could set the
>sgid bit in absolute mode on 2.5.1, and I'm pretty sure that it also
>worked on 2.6.x. Anyone have any idea when and why this changed?
>
>I wonder how many millions of shell scripts and other sysadmin tools
>broke as a result of this :)
>
It also works that way on solaris 9. I don't have a copy of solaris 2.6
or 2.5 to test.
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