[TUHS] History of chown semantics

[Clem Cole]

On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 4:29 PM, Brian S Walden <tuhs at cuzuco.com> wrote:

> http://www3.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/vol57-1978/articles/bstj57-6-2177.pdf


Brian - I know the paper and Mash - the 3rd author and lived the times ;-)

I just don't see how having the ability to give away a file to some one
else made it easier for anyone - system programmer or admin.   The idea of
giving a device back begs the question of how did you get ownership in the
first place.

The one thing I could think of was something like the RJE system that you
would wanted to have made your files be owned by the RJE system, have them
send it to the mainframe, get back information and then give the results
back to you.   If they wanted to do that subsystem with out a root style
privilege, you would need some way to give files away.

But I can think of other ways to do that without needing the chown(2) call
to work with that semantic, so I really don't understand what it was used.

To me, it does not seem to be worth much.   As I said have to ask Mash if
he remembers why it was considered a good idea.

Clem
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