Re: [PATCH] Cygwin: utils: chattr: Improve option parsing.

[Christian Franke <Christian.Franke@t-online.de>]

Hi Corinna,

Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> Hi Christian,
>
> On May 20 12:01, Christian Franke wrote:
>> Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>> On May 19 17:46, Christian Franke wrote:
>>>> ...
>>>> $ egrep 'ACL|--r' chattr.c
>>>>             "Get POSIX ACL information\n"
>>>>         "  -R, --recursive     recursively list attributes of directories and
>>>> their \n"
>>> Oops.  Please patch while you're at it...
>>> ...
>>>>   From 865a5a50501f3fd0cf5ed28500d3e6e45a6456de Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
>>>> From: Christian Franke<...>
>>>> Date: Wed, 19 May 2021 16:24:47 +0200
>>>> Subject: [PATCH] Cygwin: utils: chattr: Improve option parsing.
>>>>
>>>> Interpret '-h' as '--help' only if last argument.
>>> Who was the idiot using -h for help *and* the hidden flag? *blush*
>>>
>>> I'd vote for --help to be changed to -H for the single character
>>> option.  The help output is very unlikely to be used in scripts,
>>> so that shouldn't be a backward compat problem.
>> New patch attached.
>>
>> Note that there is now the possibly unexpected (& hidden) behavior that
>> 'chattr -h' without file argument clears the hidden attribute of cwd.
> Uhm... why?

Because chattr uses '.' as default if no FILE argument is specified. The 
same applies to all other '+-=MODE' arguments. The patch does not change 
this behavior but of course enables it for '-h'.


>    Isn't that easily avoidable?

Yes: make FILE argument mandatory - but this would break backward 
compatibility.

Another behavior (possibly inherited from lsattr) is also not very useful:
'chattr +-=MODE DIRECTORY' also changes the attributes of all elements 
in the directory (not recursively). It is not possible to solely change 
the attributes of a directory except if it is the current directory and 
no FILE argument is passed. Fixing this would again break backward 
compatibility.

Regards,
Christian