Stupid Ubuntu 8.10

[NoOp]

On 11/10/2008 07:23 PM, Erik Christiansen wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 10:54:55AM -0400, Derek Broughton wrote:
[snip]
>> 
>> So, fix man.  Far too many scripts still use periods, there appears to be no
>> intent of ever removing the ability to use periods, and the man page should
>> match the actual program it documents.
> 
> Yes, even if chown's manpage has been POSIXed to a lower state of
> usefulness, the executable's backwards compatibility has been
> maintained, so traditional unix usage has not been broken. (It's about
> 20 years since I last looked at that page, so I hadn't noticed, despite
> using unix/linux every working day in that time.)
> 
> I'm not likely to change on the command line (where this thread's
> actions occurred, IIRC.). Maybe if NoOp rather more gently beats us over
> the head henceforth, we'll try to remember the new fashion when advising
> the next generation. But if my scripts are "older", rather than
> portable, then that's OK, 'cos they work faultlessly for me. :-)
> 
> If the new generation needs '.' == ':' explained, then the manpage could
> usefully do that.
> 
> Erik
> 

I understand. :-)

My point is that this list is Ubuntu specific & the OP was having issues
with specific command line instructions. While the dot command does
indeed work, the man page on this system shows _only_ `:' so that's what
_I'd_ recommend when providing Ubuntu specific advise.

Further, I also see that the reason for changing from dot to colon is to
avoid issues with the dot in user/group names; seems reasonable to me as
the OP could have had a user/group name of 'vafa.vafa/vafa.mycomputer'
and I wonder if the dot command would have worked in that case. Example:

sudo chown -R vafa.vafa.vafa.mycomputer /MyDirectory

But I just tested and answered my own question as vafa.vafa (or
test.test in my case) doesn't work on Ubuntu when adding a new user; it
gives a warning with "User name has invalid characters" so it's probably
a mute point w/regard to Ubuntu. So I bow to the 'old scripter's' :-) &
thanks for the pointer (pun intended :-).