B20.1: File permissions

["Kevin Wright" <kwright at uk dot mdis dot com>]

Can any one explain to me the cygwin philosophy of file permissions ?

I originally ran into trouble with test -w.  ls -l would report a file as
being writable, but test -w would say it wasn't.  When I tried to report
this as a bug, I was told it wasn't a bug but was by design !  Now I've not
seen any documentation anywhere on Unix that says that test -w only reports
files with 3w's as writable, so this must be an inconsistency at least.

Anyway I was informed if I downloaded a later snapshot, and set CYGWIN=ntsec
then this would solve my problem.

Sure enough the ls -l and test -w inconsistency disappeared under these
conditions.  Now I have the marvellous state of affairs where ls -l says a
file is writable and attrib says the file is read only.

Am I alone in trying to mix cygwin with normal NT commands ?

What is wrong with checking NT's and cygwin's version of permissions
throughout the code in a consistent manner ?

The above problems don't seem to fit with this quote from the cygwin FAQ
"What is it ?"

"Even if the development tools are of little to no use to you, you may have
interest in the many standard Unix utilities provided with the package. They
can be used both from the bash shell (provided) or from the standard Windows
command shell. "

Which doesn't state, but implies that cygwin utilities can be used in
conjunction with Windows based utilities.

My initial contact with cygwin was using B17 and I was impressed with the
range of utilities available and the ability to intermix commands.  However
the occasional command crashes when using pipes seemed to get more frequent,
so I upgraded to B20.1.  The command crashes went away, but I still haven't
found a configuration that works for me.

Would purchasing Cygwin 1.0 help to solve my problems ?






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