Bug 8040

Summary:	chown will not work on some account names
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Richard Fairthorne <ebonyrun>
Component:	fileutils	Assignee:	Bernhard Rosenkraenzer <bero>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	6.1
Target Milestone:	---
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Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Last Closed:	2000-01-17 13:54:37 UTC	Type:	---
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Richard Fairthorne 1999-12-29 07:05:22 UTC

chown incorrectly identifies account names containing periods as being
invalid. You may only chown files to such users by using numeric user-id's.

I discovered this problem while writing a script on the SPARC platform,
but I'm hazarding a wild guess that it's not a SPARC specific problem.

Here's how to duplicate it.

useradd toecheese.com
mkdir any_dir
chown toecheese.com any_dir

The chown will fail.

Comment 1 Bernhard Rosenkraenzer 2000-01-17 13:54:59 UTC

It's not a bug, it's POSIX compliance.
You're not supposed to use a . in usernames.

chown toecheese.com blah

is equivalent to

chown toecheese file
chgrp com file

If you absolutely need to use a . in usernames, you can work around this by
using the User ID instead of the name, for example
chown `id toecheese.com` file

Comment 2 Bernhard Rosenkraenzer 2000-01-17 13:57:59 UTC

Sorry, `id -u toecheese.com` of course.