On 01/25/2014 11:28 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote: >> On browsing the man pages on web i noticed this was only the case with UNIX >> man page. Man pages at >> freeBSD<http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=chown&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+7.0-RELEASE&format=html>and >> oracle >> <http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19683-01/816-0210/6m6nb7m5t/index.html>showed >> the command usage as expected.
BSD and Solaris do not have as many extensions as GNU. >> >> I believe the correct usage would be >> >> chown [OPTION]... OWNER[:GROUP] FILE... Wrong - in GNU, we have intentionally chosen to add an extension that allows owner to be optional, even though POSIX does not require such an extension. >> >> Please do the corrections necessary and inform me if i am making a mistake >> in interpreting this. > > Owner is optional. The info docs illustrate this more clearly: > https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/chown-invocation.html This document covers the GNU extension. That said, there IS a bug about the documentation being misleading. See http://debbugs.gnu.org/15945 which states: > But I _still_ think we need to > split into two lines to make it obvious that the argument itself is > mandatory, as in: > > Usage: chown [OPTION]... OWNER[:[GROUP]] FILE... > or: chown [OPTION]... :[GROUP] FILE... > > or even rewrite it along the lines of the info page: > > Usage: chown [OPTION]... NEWSPEC FILE... > > and document that NEWSPEC is [OWNER][:[GROUP]] -- Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
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