New subject: History of chown semantics

10 Jan 2014

non-su chown worked in pwb, if the caller owned the file. code had to be
added then to the system call to strip the setuid/setgid bits if you were
not su, for obvious security reasons.  you didnt see that bit stripping
in, say the v6/v7 code.

...
  From: Tim Bradshaw &lt;tfb(a)tfeb.org&gt;

 Sorry if this is off-topic but I bet someone here will know.

 I recently had a significant surprise when I discovered that on HP-UX ordinary users can
still give away files. Various of us who remember fairly old Unixes then sat around trying
to remember which systems had this and where it came from: getting it almost entirely
wrong, it turns out.

 What we remembered was that it came from BSD, but this seems to be entirely wrong.  It
looks like it originated with System III / V, and perhaps was imported from there into
some SunOS (possibly it was in all versions before Solaris?) which is why we remember it
as being in BSD.  It must have been in some 80s system or we would not remember it.  POSIX
still allows it but clearly reluctantly.

 So the questions are: (a) did it originate in System III or does it go back further than
that, and (b) was it in the BSD-derived SunOSes or are we just making that up?

 And I guess: who thought this was a good idea?

 Thanks

 --tim 

Re: [TUHS] History of chown semantics