Re: Test failures in coreutils-5.3.0 on cygwin

[Eric Blake]

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According to Paul Eggert on 1/17/2005 3:42 PM:
> Conceivably this problem could occur on Unix too.  I installed this
> patch to work around it (on Unix, anyway) by using group numbers
> rather than names.
> 
> 2005-01-17  Paul Eggert  <address@hidden>
> 
>       * tests/group-names: Use numeric group ids, not symbolic group names,
>       since the latter can have shell metacharacters in them (e.g., spaces).
>       Problem reported by Eric Blake.
>       * tests/chgrp/basic: Assume groups are numeric, not symbolic.

However, POSIX requires that a group name that is completely numeric (yes,
that is a portable group name) takes preference over a group number.  In
other words, if group 1 is named "2", but I am only a member of group 2
named "two", then the chgrp tests will still fail because `chgrp 2 file'
should resolve to a call to chown("file", -1, 1), not chown("file", -1,
2).  If only your testsuite could add users/groups for the duration of the
test, to prove that chgrp is correctly favoring names over numbers.

Also, I noticed some other tests in the suite that were sensitive to group
names.  At the moment, I'm not on the machine where I noticed all the
problems, but off the top of my head, I remember that at least
chown/separator was calling `id' directly rather than relying on
group-names, and failing when id returned a space-separated name.

Is there any program that makes it easy to map between group names and
numbers, other than manually trying to parse /etc/group?  Is it worth
adding more GNU extensions to the id program to accomplish this?  I
envision something like the following, using the group name examples above:

id --map -gn 1 # $?=0, prints 2
id --map -gn 2 # $?=0, prints two
id --map -g 1 # $?=1, stderr mentions group not found
id --map -g 2 # $?=0, prints 1
id --map -g two # $?=0, prints 2
# and likewise for id --map -u; using -n maps from number to name,
otherwise map name to number

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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