SemiOT: filePro on FreeBSD chown gotcha

[Fairlight]

With neither thought nor caution, Jay Ashworth blurted:
> On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 01:39:26PM -0400, Fairlight wrote:
> > This public service announcement was brought to you by Jay Ashworth:
> > > > Hate to tell you, but Solaris 7 and 8 both constrain chown() as well.
> > > 
> > > Did you have the impression I'd be surprised?  Polaris is BSD-based.
> > 
> > Bzzzzt.  SVR4-based.  SunOS 4.1.x was the last truly BSD-based Sun offering.
> 
> I thought it was still dual-universe.  No?

What do you mean, exactly, by dual-universe?  As I said, SunOS 4.1.x was
wholly BSD-derived.  At the point they released the first Solaris, that was
SVR4-based.  While SVR4 contains some BSD code, it's still SysV.

> I dunno; *my* interpretation of that manpage was that it was compliing
> your *app* to use fchown that was what they meant.

Rereading what they say about the prototype for fchown only being available
if _BSD_SOURCE is defined may indeed point to how you compile your
application.  However, fchown is simply a chown that takes an open file
descriptor instead of a pathname.  And -using- BSD would be the exact
opposite of what you want, since it's the BSD variance that induces this
"Not owner" type behaviour.

mark->
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