Bug#488039: policy: chown uses owner:group not owner.group
Ian Jackson <ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> Kurt Roeckx writes ("Bug#488039: policy: chown uses owner:group not owner.group"):
>> There are several places in policy that use something like "root.root",
>> when talking about the owner and group of a file. People used to use
>> that notation to separate the owner and group, and it still works, but
>> the proper notation would be "root:root".
> What is wrong with <user>.<group> ? I see that it's not currently
> documented but it has worked forever and I hope it's not going away.
It's been deprecated for a long time because it's ambiguous in the
presence of usernames containing periods. Since a username on UNIX is
never permitted to have a colon due to the format of the passwd file,
colon is a better delimiter.
Support for periods probably won't ever go away, but best practice is to
use colons.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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