GNU bug report logs - #819
23.0.60; group and owner "Everyone" - what's that about?

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From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
To: Drew Adams <drew.adams <at> oracle.com>, 819 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Cc: emacs-pretest-bug <at> gnu.org, bug-gnu-emacs <at> gnu.org
Subject: bug#819: 23.0.60; group and owner "Everyone" - what's that about?
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:46:00 +0300

> From: "Drew Adams" <drew.adams <at> oracle.com>
> Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:00:39 -0700
> Cc: 
> 
> emacs -Q
> Dired on a subdir of, say, c:\
>  
> .. has the owner and group listed as "Everyone". What's that about? If
> I click `..', I see that none of the files or subdirectories in c:\
> belong to "Everyone" (in my case). That "Everyone" artifact is
> incorrect and misleading.

You interpret "Everyone" too literally.  "Everyone" is the Windows way
of attributing a file's ownership to no one in particular.  This is
what you will see for each and every file on a FAT32 volume, because
FAT32 does not support file security, only NTFS does.

So "Everyone" is not an artefact, it's what Windows reports to Emacs
as the owner and primary group of a file or directory.

That said, I cannot reproduce this on my machine, with NTFS
filesystem: each file and directory I see belongs to some valid user
or group, and in particular all subdirectories of c:\ have
"Administrators" as the owner of ".." and "SYSTEM" as its primary
group.  That is what I'd expect on a typical Windows machine with NTFS
filesystem.

So what you see is some strange peculiarity of your system, I think.
Perhaps because you upgraded your filesystem from FAT32?

In any case, "Everyone" is a legitimate value of a Windows owner
and/or primary group of a file.

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