Re: PATCH: chown and chgrp in files module

[James Kirkpatrick <jimkirk@uwyo.edu>]

OK, I understand.  "Conditionally builtin" :-)

Jim

On Thu, 9 Dec 1999, Zefram wrote:

> James Kirkpatrick wrote:
> >I'm not sure I understand.  chown and chgrp are now builtins?
> 
> If you load the files module.  If you do nothing, you get the usual
> external programs.  rm, mv, ln, mkdir, rmdir and sync are already
> available as builtins in exactly the same way.
> 
> >                                                                  Are they
> >POSIX compliant?
> 
> Almost.  chown accepts "." to separate username and group, in addition to
> the POSIX ":".  This is the same level of POSIX conformance as GNU chown.
> 
> >This does not seem to be the sort of thing that should be built in to a
> >shell, any more than rm, ls, find, or a C compiler :-)
> 
> It's very useful to have these things built into a statically-linked
> system administration shell.  (That's where the request for a builtin
> chown originated.)  In addition to the utilities I listed above, we have
> a `stat' module that effectively makes possible a full implementation
> of ls as a shell function, and zsh globbing with glob qualifiers very
> nearly makes find redundant.
> 
> -zefram