[TUHS] Early UNIX file permission oddity
Warren Toomey
wkt at tuhs.org
Wed May 21 21:20:53 AEST 2008
On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 07:08:51AM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> It's important to remember that 1st, 2nd, 3rd, ... represent editions of
> the *manual*, and that there is no guarantee that any particular
> snapshot of the system corresponds exactly to what was in any particular
> manual edition. Research Unix (as it was later called retrospectively)
> was right up to the end a continuously evolving system, and the whole
> concept of releases simply did not exist for it.
> So when the CACM article was written, it probably specified what the
> kernel was doing that particular day, without reference to any edition.
Yes, exactly right. That's always in the back of my mind, so sometimes I
forget to make it explicit. What I should have said that the CACM paper
possibly indicates that UNIX went through the stages:
"rwrw" + "x" ==> "rwxrwx" ==> "rwxrwxrwx"
sometime between the points in time known as 3rd and 4th Editions.
Thanks John,
Warren
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