jmsellens@watdragon.UUCP (John M. Sellens) (11/13/87)
Reply-Path: The 4.3 chown call allows users to change groups, and the chgrp(1) command is globally executable and setuid root. This just restricts users from changing groups within a program, without using /bin/chgrp. Seems kind of silly to me ... I hope it saves a *lot* of complexity in the kernel, though I sort of doubt it.
chuck@felix.UUCP (11/18/87)
Reply-Path: I was recently wondering about this also. It seems illogical to require a user to be root to change the group of a program, and then supply a suid'ed program to allow them to do so anyway. As longer as the user owns the file, and is in the group it is being set to, they should be able to change it. This would be easy enough to check for in the kernel. It is probably a holdover from the days when a user was only in one group at a time. ------------------------------------------------------------ Howie Kaye howie@columbia.edu Columbia University hlkcu@cuvma.bitnet Systems Group ...!rutgers!columbia!howie
chuck@felix.UUCP (11/20/87)
Reply-Path:
In the olden days of Unix, typically a user used to be confided to one
group at a time. By "olden days" I mean the < 4.x era of BSD. On the
2.0 it doesn't seem to have much significance as it would have had on
the previous versions
news@unmvax.unm.edu (The News service) (12/08/87)
in 4.3 chown was restricte to superuser because "users were able to give files away" and "defeat the file-space accounting procedues." perhaps ultrix did the same for the same reason. Bill