Re: PATCH: chown and chgrp in files module

[Zefram <zefram@xxxxxxxx>]

James Kirkpatrick wrote:
>I'm not sure I understand.  chown and chgrp are now builtins?

If you load the files module.  If you do nothing, you get the usual
external programs.  rm, mv, ln, mkdir, rmdir and sync are already
available as builtins in exactly the same way.

>                                                                  Are they
>POSIX compliant?

Almost.  chown accepts "." to separate username and group, in addition to
the POSIX ":".  This is the same level of POSIX conformance as GNU chown.

>This does not seem to be the sort of thing that should be built in to a
>shell, any more than rm, ls, find, or a C compiler :-)

It's very useful to have these things built into a statically-linked
system administration shell.  (That's where the request for a builtin
chown originated.)  In addition to the utilities I listed above, we have
a `stat' module that effectively makes possible a full implementation
of ls as a shell function, and zsh globbing with glob qualifiers very
nearly makes find redundant.

-zefram