Subject: Re: bug#8729: RFE: chmod "-D" operate on dir's only

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 May 2011 11:30:59 -0600

tag 8729 notabug
close 8729
thanks

On 05/25/2011 11:12 AM, Linda Walsh wrote:
>     That's what a capital X does?   Huh....how interesting...  That'll
> work for my purposes usually, ...damn cryptic, if you ask me, but so
> what... I
> I do see it in the man page, but I thought cap-x was used for something
> else,

The info pages are more complete on this topic (the man page comes from
'chmod --help' output, which is necessarily terse).  See "Conditional
Executability" under 'info coreutils "Symbolic Modes"'.

You are welcome to submit patches to improve clarity [at which point we
could reopen this bug], but for now, I'm marking this bug as closed.

> as I've seen it in the output of 'ls' occasionally...
>
> Maybe it's an unrelated usage.

I'm not sure I've seen 'X' used in ls output.  I've seen 's', 'S', 't',
'T', 'l', and 'L' in place of the traditional '-', 'x'; all according to
the state of the special bit associated with that particular 'x'
position, and whether the special bit is set without the executable bit
also set.

So I guess an 'X' designation from ls might occur on some implementation
that wants to flag your attention that a special bit is set but the x
bit is not, but where that setting makes no sense unless the x bit is
also turned on (that is, an alternative to 'S', 'T', or 'L'), but
neither coreutils, Solaris, nor BSD ls will output 'X'.

-- 
Eric Blake   [email-masked]    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org