Re: x bit for dirs: misfeature?

Flavio Stanchina
2001-11-19T21:01:52Z

On Monday 19 November 2001 20:39, vda wrote:

> Patches for chmod source would be better. Perhaps I should do that...
> Let's refrain from "you're fool... go read manpage" type
> discussions. Not productive.

Calling you a fool would certainly be stupid, however you are arguing
about a feature that Unix filesystems have had since the beginning of time
and that every sysadmin uses quite frequently (as described in several
posts) so you're not going to get much support, not on LKML at least. ;-)

Patching chmod to add a new option would save some typing once in a while,
but if you find yourself doing such chmod'ing often the very obvious
solution (which was already proposed) is

find -type d -exec chmod +x \{\} \;

eventually wrapped in a script, alias or whatever. That's what Unices are
good for: you can easily build new utilities by combining existing ones,
no need to patch anything.

Some might agree that assigning different purposes to the 'x' bit for
files and directories might be confusing, but there's a fix for that too:
just think "eXplore" instead of "eXecute" when you look at directories.

Now one could start arguing about the setgid bit too, and that's more
dangerous than the execute/explore bit, but again, it always worked that
way and it ain't gonna change anytime soon.

--
Ciao,
Flavio Stanchina
Trento - Italy

"The best defense against logic is ignorance."