Stupid Ubuntu 8.10

[NoOp]

On 11/09/2008 07:10 PM, NoOp wrote:
> On 11/09/2008 05:48 PM, Derek Broughton wrote:
>> NoOp wrote:
[snip]
>>> 
>>> Perhaps you mean:
>>> 
>>> sudo chown -R vafa:vafa /MyDirectory
>>> 
>>> notice the colon between vafa and vafa vs the period.
>> 
>> It's nice that you can do that, but I've always used periods...
> 
> $ man chown

Sorry, just to follow up & to head off the usual 'it works for me et al':

$ info coreutils 'chown invocation'

states:

<quote>
   Some older scripts may still use `.' in place of the `:' separator.
POSIX 1003.1-2001 (*note Standards conformance::) does not require
support for that, but for backward compatibility GNU `chown' supports
`.' so long as no ambiguity results.  New scripts should avoid the use
of `.' because it is not portable, and because it has undesirable
results if the entire OWNER`.'GROUP happens to identify a user whose
name contains `.'.
</quote>

So a '.' will perhaps work, _but it should be avoided_.