bug#16550: Request review of CHOWN man page synopsis

[Pádraig Brady]

tag 16550 notabug
close 16550
stop

On 01/25/2014 01:11 PM, Anubhav Chaturvedi wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I was going through the man page ( on my Ubuntu 12.04 ) and noticed that in
> the synopsis, owner has been marked as optional ( i.e, it is enclosed in  [
> ] ).
> 
> chown [OPTION]... [OWNER][:[GROUP]] FILE...
> 
> On browsing the man pages on web i noticed this was only the case with UNIX
> man page. Man pages at
> freeBSD<http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=chown&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+7.0-RELEASE&format=html>and
> oracle 
> <http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19683-01/816-0210/6m6nb7m5t/index.html>showed
> the command usage as expected.
> 
> I believe the correct usage would be
> 
> chown [OPTION]... OWNER[:GROUP] FILE...
> 
> Please do the corrections necessary and inform me if i am making a mistake
> in interpreting this.

Owner is optional. The info docs illustrate this more clearly:
https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/chown-invocation.html

thanks,
Pádraig.