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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