file permissions

[Dennis Payne <dulsi@identicalsoftware.com>]

Majordomo thought this might be a admin request because one of the lines
began with config.  Bad majordomo.

> From: "Brian K. White" <linut@squonk.net>
> 
> while using xwoe to edit some system config files today, everything I
> touched stopped working (ppp and uucp, which on SCO is used by ppp to
> dial out, and by getty for dial-in) bad bad bad! After some slightly
> panicy time I discovered that xwpe saves files with the ownership of the
> user if possible, since I was root, editing uucp, ppp, and other system
> config files, uucp files lost their ownership of "uucp:uucp", lp files
> lost their ownerships of "lp:bin" etc... and everything that I had
> edited became "root:sys", and everything that I had worked on stopped
> working.
> 
> On SCO, many (most? all?) systems ignore files that don't have the exact
> correct ownership. in many cases it doesn't matter if a config file is
> set to "everyone can do everything". If it's not owned by the right user
> and group it gets ignored and the system it was part of breaks.
> 
> Any ideas how to change this? Personally, I'd like it to save
> preexisting files without changing the ownership, even if it's root
> doing the editing. *especially* then. New files I guess would of course
> have to default to the same as the user saving the file. Ultimately I
> guess the file-manager should have chmod and chown abilities, but for
> now all I really need is to change the file-save routine to leave the
> ownership alone if the destination file already exists, probably
> xwpe-generated .bak files should retain the ownership of the source file
> too, even though technically, the .bak file is being created new often
> times.
> 
> --
> Brian~
>