chown: warning: '.' should be ':': 'IDIOT.users'

babydr · 04-01-2024, 03:38 PM

Does anyone no Why this has become an ever changing parameter delimiter ?

Code:

chown: warning: '.' should be ':': 'IDIOT.users'

I've had to change my scripts at least twice before .
For this same &/or simular delimiter changes ,
in the ch* user modification programs .

Just seems Freek'n silly to me ... Thank You for some usable insight !

JimL

jayjwa · 04-01-2024, 03:52 PM

It's been like this for awhile, if you are refering to replacement of "." with ":". https://serverfault.com/questions/19...group-in-chown

mw.decavia · 04-01-2024, 07:06 PM

That is a rather insulting warning. Perhaps the user should be called something less mean, like "silly" or something?

chrisretusn · 04-01-2024, 08:16 PM

I see no insult with that.

babydr · 04-01-2024, 11:48 PM

@All , I've been using '.' as a user.group seperator for many years !
Because no users name could contain a '.' in it as it would , way back when , confuse the Shell that I had put a hostname to it to be parsed AND could not be used in an email address , Thus could not be a users name .
Maybe that tells you how long I've been pecking on keyboards ?-)
And maybe what the first os I might have worked on was ?-)
Gnuff gnarled ;-) JimL

allend · 04-02-2024, 12:46 AM

Quote:

@All , I've been using '.' as a user.group seperator for many years !

You have company

chrisretusn · 04-02-2024, 01:03 AM

I think we should just top this off as April Fool's.

marav · 04-02-2024, 11:30 AM

Code:

2022-02-24
+  chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
+  which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
+  causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
+  Applications should use ":" instead of ".".

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/co...e34c92745169b6

hazel · 04-02-2024, 11:58 AM

If you really want to be insulted, use sudo a few times with the wrong password!

chrisretusn · 04-02-2024, 07:59 PM

Here is a test run with chown:

Code:

~# ls -l pinxi 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1331397 Mar  3 15:56 pinxi*
~# chown chris. pinxi 
chown: warning: '.' should be ':': ‘chris.’
~# ls -l pinxi 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 chris users 1331397 Mar  3 15:56 pinxi*
~# chown root.users pinxi 
chown: warning: '.' should be ':': ‘root.users’
~# ls -l pinxi 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root users 1331397 Mar  3 15:56 pinxi*
~# chown IDIOT pinxi 
chown: invalid user: ‘IDIOT’
~# ls -l pinxi 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root users 1331397 Mar  3 15:56 pinxi*
~# chown IDIOT.root pinxi 
chown: invalid user: ‘IDIOT.root’
~# ls -l pinxi 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root users 1331397 Mar  3 15:56 pinxi*
~# chown IDIOT:root pinxi 
chown: invalid user: ‘IDIOT:root’
~# ls -l pinxi 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root users 1331397 Mar  3 15:56 pinxi*
~# chown root:root pinxi 
~# ls -l pinxi 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1331397 Mar  3 15:56 pinxi*

I've used Linux, before that Unix for many years, The syntax as I remember, has been "owner:group" I don't recall ever using "owner.group". It has been a while since my Unix days, so I could be mistaken.

volkerdi · 04-03-2024, 08:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrisretusn

I've used Linux, before that Unix for many years, The syntax as I remember, has been "owner:group" I don't recall ever using "owner.group". It has been a while since my Unix days, so I could be mistaken.

Yeah, I got my first warning about user.group (in email, not from chown) sometime back in the mid 90s.

GazL · 04-04-2024, 04:06 AM

Found this on stack-exchange.

Quote:

Important historical context: when chown first gained the ability to do user and group in a single command (4.3BSD is the earliest such example I can find), people didn't do crazy things like put dots in their usernames. Dots, dashes, capital letters, more than 8 characters long... all unthinkable. Also the colon is the one character that's safe from future growth of the set of allowable usernames, because it's the separator in /etc/passwd

4.3bsd dates back to 1986, which predates my involvement with UNIX/Linux. I was likely still using a 6502 VIC=20 or BBC Micro back then as the Amiga didn't come out until 87.