gerber@sirius.astro.uiuc.edu (Richard Gerber) (05/17/91)
Hi all, What does the 'r' protection bit under AmigaDOS do? I thought it would prohibit read access, but it appears to have no affect on anything. In fact all these bits seem a bit screwy to me. I played around with text files, I set various bits then tried to edit the file with ed, and here's what I found: (1) Can I read the file into ed? (2) Can I save changes made in ed? (3) Can I delete the file? (4) Final status after trying to save in ed. Original (1) (2) (3) (4) status Filename ----rwed Textfile YES YES YES ----rwed -----wed Textfile YES YES YES ----rwed ----r-ed Textfile YES YES YES ----rwed ----rwe- Textfile YES NO NO ----rwe- -------d Textfile YES YES YES ----rwed -------- Textfile YES NO NO -------- ----r--d Textfile YES YES YES ----rwed i So it appears that the only thing that has any effect is the 'd' bit. Even worse, the program Stevie lets me edit and save changes with all protection bits turned off. (It does keep a copy of the original in filename.bak, however.) So am I just missing something here? How do these things work? Regards, Richard gerber@rigel.astro.uiuc.edu
alex@bilver.uucp (Alex Matulich) (05/21/91)
In article <1991May17.133831.2388@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> gerber@sirius.astro.uiuc.edu (Richard Gerber) writes: >What does the 'r' protection bit under AmigaDOS do? I thought it >would prohibit read access, but it appears to have no affect on >anything. [stuff deleted] >So it appears that the only thing that has any effect is the 'd' bit. As I understand it, you are correct. The alternative shell WShell, however, is not as loose about the protection bits. If a file does not have "e" set, the it's not an executable. If a file doesn't have "w" set, you can't write to it. I see no point, in a single user OS, for read-protection. What use is a write-only file? -- _ |__ Alex Matulich /(+__> Unicorn Research Corp, 4621 N Landmark Dr, Orlando, FL 32817 //| \ UUCP: alex@bilver.uucp <or> ...uunet!tarpit!bilver!alex ///__) bitnet: IN%"bilver!alex@uunet.uu.net"