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#61720
BUG: omission of crucial detail in 'chown --reference' man page (vs info)
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Your message dated Thu, 23 Feb 2023 15:28:18 +0000
with message-id <9da5c543-b184-7006-e677-b2c674041b37 <at> draigBrady.com>
and subject line Re: bug#61720: BUG: omission of crucial detail in 'chown --reference' man page (vs info)
has caused the debbugs.gnu.org bug report #61720,
regarding BUG: omission of crucial detail in 'chown --reference' man page (vs info)
to be marked as done.
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help-debbugs <at> gnu.org.)
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61720: https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=61720
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Hi,
The (RHEL 7) man page for GNU 'chown' has (only) this for the '--reference' flag:
use RFILE's owner and group rather than specifying OWNER:GROUP values
which omits the crucial second sentence, included in the info tree:
Change the user and group of each FILE to be the same as those of
REF_FILE. If REF_FILE is a symbolic link, do not use the user and
group of the symbolic link, but rather those of the file it refers
to.
(Note that '--no-deference' doesn't affect this behavior.)
I can't be sure, but I think the GNU build itself is generating this man page, as opposed to it having been created by RHEL.
I understand that the man pages are secondary and brief, but they shouldn't be actively misleading, IMO.
Thanks,
Mike
Michael Coleman
Computational Scientist
Research Advanced Computing Services (HPC)
University of Oregon
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On 22/02/2023 22:07, Michael Coleman wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The (RHEL 7) man page for GNU 'chown' has (only) this for the '--reference' flag:
>
> use RFILE's owner and group rather than specifying OWNER:GROUP values
>
> which omits the crucial second sentence, included in the info tree:
>
> Change the user and group of each FILE to be the same as those of
> REF_FILE. If REF_FILE is a symbolic link, do not use the user and
> group of the symbolic link, but rather those of the file it refers
> to.
>
> (Note that '--no-deference' doesn't affect this behavior.)
>
> I can't be sure, but I think the GNU build itself is generating this man page, as opposed to it having been created by RHEL.
>
> I understand that the man pages are secondary and brief, but they shouldn't be actively misleading, IMO.
It is worth stating that in the man page,
especially since one might think --no-dereference might change behavior.
Fixing this with the attached.
Marking this as done.
thanks,
Pádraig
[chown-doc-ref-symlinks.patch (text/x-patch, attachment)]
This bug report was last modified 2 years and 85 days ago.
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