Dear cygwin people As some of you might have noticed (sorry for the flood), I'm still trying to arbitrate The Fight between Perl 5.002 and cygwin32-B20.1 (the battlefield being NT4/SP4). Well, thanks to some of you, I nearly did it (and also ruined a couple of nights), but a strange problem lead me to some more confusion : Problem : although I'm working as single user on a standalone workstation, and always logged as sysadmin ("administrateur" in french), cygwin seems to see/create the files on my hard disk as *not* belonging to me, but to another "being" (which is not obvious to me). I'll do my best to describe it (it's really *easy* to observe) : let's have a look at a simple Perl example, then a short C example with stat(), and my /etc/passwd and /etc/group. Finally I will create a simple file with 'touch', and you will notice that it will be reported as NOT belonging to me and not being writable :(( Note : this seems specific to NT, which is not surprising regarding file permissions. Perl example : ---------------------- Note : I created /etc/passwd and /etc/group with 'mkpasswd -l' and 'mkgroup -l' respectively, as reported in many FAQS. administrateur [26] /etc$ perl -e 'print "yes" if -w "group";' administrateur [27] /etc$ ll total 7 -rw-r--r-- 1 544 Aucun 27 Feb 26 02:45 group -rw-r--r-- 1 544 Aucun 65 Mar 1 21:08 passwd -rw-r--r-- 1 544 Aucun 9828 Dec 1 14:00 termcap That command (-w) will display 'yes' if the file (here, /etc/group) is writable. Apparently, it fails. And fails everywhere in my filesystem. The '-w' command is using C, let's move on : C example : ---------------------- #include #include int main() { struct stat mystat; stat("group", &mystat); printf("mode : %o, uid : %u, gid : %u\n", mystat.st_mode, mystat.st_uid, mystat.st_gid); exit(0); } Run : administrateur [52] /etc$ gcc mystat.c administrateur [53] /etc$ a.exe mode : 100644, uid : 544, gid : 513 administrateur [55] /etc$ ll group -rw-r--r-- 1 544 Aucun 27 Feb 26 02:45 group Which means : - /etc/group belongs to user which UID is 544, and to group which GID is 513 - it's a regular file (100000), - read/write permission to owner (600), read permission to group (40) and read to other (4). BUT (and it drives me crazy). I CREATED that file, and I'm NOT user 544 ! (more about this strange fellow below). administrateur [56] /etc$ whoami administrateur administrateur [74] /etc$ cat passwd Administrateur::500:513:seb::/bin/sh InvitÚ::501:513:::/bin/sh administrateur [75] /etc$ cat group Aucun::513: Everyone::0: Obviously, I'm user 500 (I changed my name to 'seb' so that to check). => Therefore WHY are all files created as 544 (even with tar) ? (the group is correct : 513). I thought it was related to /etc/passwd, but I just do NOT UNDERSTAND the difference between -l and -g option for 'mkpasswd'. -l,--local print local accounts -g,--local-groups print local group information too administrateur [77] /etc$ mkpasswd -l Administrateur::500:513:seb::/bin/sh InvitÚ::501:513:::/bin/sh administrateur [79] /etc$ mkpasswd -g Administrateurs::544:0::: Duplicateurs::552:0::: InvitÚs::546:0::: OpÚrateurs de sauvegarde::551:0::: Utilisateurs::545:0::: Utilisateurs avec pouvoir::547:0::: => who are these users ?!? these should be groups !! I'm belonging to the "Administrateurs" group for NT (in the "Gestionnaire d'utilisateurs" ~= "User manager"), and this has been translated to a user, I'm completely lost :(( => dumping 'mkpasswd -l -g' to /etc/passwd (instead of 'mkpasswd -l') did NOT help. Here is the same joke : administrateur [84] /etc$ touch test administrateur [85] /etc$ ll test -rw-r--r-- 1 544 Aucun 0 Mar 1 21:46 test administrateur [86] /etc$ perl -e 'print "yes" if -w "test";' administrateur [87] /etc$ WOAH : I created a file, and it's automatically assigned to someone else ! Give me my file back please :( And of course, although I created it, it's now NOT writable for cygwin. I guess I might be just dumb. Any help would be really appreciated (by my mental health). Thanks ______________________________________________________________ Sebastien Barre http://www.hds.utc.fr/~barre/ -- Want to unsubscribe from this list? Send a message to cygwin-unsubscribe@sourceware.cygnus.com