Pádraig Brady <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Jim Meyering wrote: >> In <http://bugs.debian.org/393283>, Helge Hafting objected to the fact >> that GNU chown performs a DB look-up for a numeric "user name", e.g., in >> "chown 0 FILE". chown does this deliberately, in case "0" is an actual >> user *name*, that is associated potentially, with some numeric user ID. >> That is the historical behavior, and it is required for POSIX conformance. >> >> Yes, that does sound silly, if not downright wrong. Who actually uses >> numeric user or group names these days? Of the systems that still allow >> such names, how many actually require or even use that capability? > > I can see this as being quite common. > Consider a university server. > In my uni all our accounts were 8 digit numbers.
Hi Pádraig, Do you know if they still do that? If numeric user names are still common enough, a compromise would be to add a configure-time option to enable one behavior or the other, and new options: --lookup-numeric --no-lookup-numeric Or maybe -- easiest of all -- just don't change anything :-) Jim
