Re: chown 0:0 testfile hangs

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit Tonnesen Steve <tonnesen@cmsd.bc.ca>

> On both machines I have one group with a large membership (The powerpc
> machine has a group with 1281 characters on the line, the intel box has a
> group with 4056 characters on that group's line in /etc/group.
[...]
> The command appears to hang.

That is a known bug in glibc: <http://bugs.debian.org/208428>. There's
a patch in the bug-tracking system, so the chances of it getting fixed
eventually are excellent.

> Is this a bug in glibc?  Is there some limit on the length of
> lines in /etc/group?

According to the BTS logs, the bug manifests itself if lines in
/etc/group (or any NSS database file) are longer than 1023
characters.

(By the way, looking at the BTS page for glibc
<http://bugs.debian.org/src:glibc> would be a more canonical way of
investigating such problems than mailing debian-devel. #208428 is the
very first bug listed on that page; going by its title it'd be hard
for you to miss).

-- 
Henning Makholm                     "However, the fact that the utterance by
                           Epimenides of that false sentence could imply the
           existence of some Cretan who is not a liar is rather unsettling."