Bug#570980: teasers

[Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@err.no>]

]] Patrick Matthäi 

Please respect my Mail-Followup-To.

| On 27.02.2010 11:56, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
| > ]]
| >
| > | Well just like many of the comments to 348864, I just hate the
| > | "teasers" in section 1 that only root can run.
| >
| > Whether a tool is root-only or not is orthogonal to whether it's in bin
| > or sbin.
| >
| > (ifconfig is useful for non-root users, but is in sbin.  chown is
| > effectively root-only, but is in bin.)
| 
| Why is chown useless for users?
| 
| me@exez:~$ touch test
| me@exez:~$ ls -l test
| -rw-r--r-- 1 me me 0 27. Feb 12:06 test
| me@exez:~$ chown :audio test
| me@exez:~$ ls -l test
| -rw-r--r-- 1 me audio 0 27. Feb 12:06 test

Ok, fair enough, you can use the part of its functionality that's
duplicated by chgrp which is also in bin, while its unique functionality
is effectively root-only.

(Or look at dpkg-trigger or dpkg-statoverride which are also in bin,
ditto for updatedb.  I'm sure you're able to find another example.)

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are