[TUHS] Early UNIX file permission oddity

[wkt@tuhs.org (Warren Toomey)]

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 07:08:51AM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> It's important to remember that 1st, 2nd, 3rd, ... represent editions of
> the *manual*, and that there is no guarantee that any particular
> snapshot of the system corresponds exactly to what was in any particular
> manual edition.  Research Unix (as it was later called retrospectively)
> was right up to the end a continuously evolving system, and the whole
> concept of releases simply did not exist for it.
> So when the CACM article was written, it probably specified what the
> kernel was doing that particular day, without reference to any edition.

Yes, exactly right. That's always in the back of my mind, so sometimes I
forget to make it explicit. What I should have said that the CACM paper
possibly indicates that UNIX went through the stages:

	"rwrw" + "x" ==> "rwxrwx" ==> "rwxrwxrwx"

sometime between the points in time known as 3rd and 4th Editions.

Thanks John,
	Warren