dired-do-rename owner abuse

dired-do-rename owner abuse

[Dan Jacobson]

dired-do-rename in
/usr/share/emacs/21.4/lisp:
-rw-r--r--  1 root 78791 2002-11-14 21:15 dired-aux.el
fails to keep the owner intact.

I am root. If I do
# mv /var/spool/exim4/input/some_files ~
the group and owner, Debian-exim, is preserved, but not if I use
dired-do-rename.

Therefore I cannot temporarily park messages elsewhere without making
them unpresentable to exim when I move them back.  Never mind, I will
try exim's freezing/thawing instead.

P.S., there is no error shown to the user when he executes
# emacs -nw -u /var/spool/exim4/input/ ~
(He meant
# emacs -nw -q /var/spool/exim4/input/ ~)

Re: dired-do-rename changes owner when used by root

[Dan Jacobson]

rms> What happens if you use M-x rename-file?
rms> Does it fail the same way?

Yes, when operating across disk partitions the owner is changed to
root. Same with dired-do-rename.  On the same partition both are OK though.

dired-do-copy also changes the owner to root, even on the same
partition, even though it advertises that it uses cp -p in the
minibuffer. However the real Debian (GNU) cp -p would not do such a
thing.

-u command line option (was: dired-do-rename owner abuse)

[Kevin Rodgers]

Dan Jacobson wrote:
 > P.S., there is no error shown to the user when he executes
 > # emacs -nw -u /var/spool/exim4/input/ ~
 > (He meant
 > # emacs -nw -q /var/spool/exim4/input/ ~)

That's because the user-init-file-1 value constructed from
init-file-user is intentionally load'ed with NOERROR, and the
init-file-user value is never checked.

Something simple like this should suffice:

*** emacs-21.3/lisp/startup.el~	Sun Mar 16 15:05:59 2003
--- emacs-21.3/lisp/startup.el	Thu Jun 16 11:49:38 2005
***************
*** 741,747 ****
   		    argval (car args)))
   	  (setq init-file-user argval
   		argval nil
! 		args (cdr args)))
   	 ((string-equal argi "-no-site-file")
   	  (setq site-run-file nil
   		args (cdr args)))
--- 741,750 ----
   		    argval (car args)))
   	  (setq init-file-user argval
   		argval nil
! 		args (cdr args))
! 	  (or (file-directory-p (concat "~" init-file-user))
! 	      (error "Option `%s' user `%s' has no home directory"
! 		     argi init-file-user)))
   	 ((string-equal argi "-no-site-file")
   	  (setq site-run-file nil
   		args (cdr args)))

-- 
Kevin Rodgers