[TUHS] History of chown semantics

John Cowan cowan at mercury.ccil.org
Fri Jan 10 05:13:37 AEST 2014


Jeremy C. Reed scripsit:

> A few years ago, Thompson had told me that while at Berkeley (on a  
> sabbatical), he did a modification at Berkeley to put in disk space 
> quotas to prevent runaways.                                         

This is apparently not the same as Robert Elz's disc [sic] quotas, which
were first released with 4.2BSD.  That was the first version to cash the
cheque supplied by all Research versions until 8th Edition:

> "Only the super-user is allowed to change the owner of a file, in
> order to simplify as yet unimplemented accounting procedures."

Since there were never any such procedures in the line leading to System
V, there was no longer any reason to restrict giving away files.

Quotas aren't very useful any more, what with most systems being either
single-user clients or servers with no need for privilege separation
other than root/non-root.  Unless you are using mandatory access
control, which has never been a standard part of any Unix-like system, I
see no reason to continue to forbid changes of ownership.

> http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=1BSD/s6/chownall.c has:
> if (chgusr && !chggrp && source.uid == 0)
> 	panic("owner of \"%s\" is uid 0 in his group !?!", spth);
> else if (!chgusr && chggrp && source.uid != 0)
> 	panic("owner of \"%s\" is not uid 0 of his group !?!", spth);
> http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=1BSD/man6/chownall.6
> also mentions the "user number 0 in his group." 

Looking at
<http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=1BSD/man6/chownall.6>
suggests that in the base system underlying 1BSD, you were only the
superuser if you had a uid of 0 and a gid of 0.  I suspect this was a
kernel patch.

-- 
First known example of political correctness:   John Cowan
After Nurhachi had united all the other         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Jurchen tribes under the leadership of the      cowan at ccil.org
Manchus, his successor Abahai (1592-1643)
issued an order that the name Jurchen should       --S. Robert Ramsey,
be banned, and from then on, they were all           The Languages of China
to be called Manchus.



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