[suggestion] File.chown to take user and group *names*

ruby-talk
1

Just a simple suggestion, but it would be really nice if File.chown could
take user and group *names* as well as numeric IDs.

It would simplify this:

  File.chown(Etc.getpwnam("foo").uid, Etc.getgrnam("bar").gid, filename)

to this:

  File.chown("foo", "bar", filename)

Seem reasonable?? There doesn't seem to be a chown in fileutils.rb either.

Regards,

Brian.

2

Brian Candler wrote:

Just a simple suggestion, but it would be really nice if File.chown could
take user and group *names* as well as numeric IDs.

It would simplify this:

  File.chown(Etc.getpwnam("foo").uid, Etc.getgrnam("bar").gid, filename)

to this:

  File.chown("foo", "bar", filename)

Seem reasonable?? There doesn't seem to be a chown in fileutils.rb either.

I've written some code like this before too and your suggestion is a good one IMHO. The relevant code is implemented in file.c. I'm not sure
if it would be a good idea to pollute this code with these kind of
lookups though. Another thing to consider is how other platforms handle this, i.e. Windows.

Does this work on win32? Etc.getpwnam("Administrator").uid

In the mean time maybe something like this...

def File.my_chown(o, g, file)
   case o
   when Numeric
     uid = o
   when String
     require 'Etc'
     uid = Etc.getpwnam(o).uid
   end

   case g
   when Numeric
     gid = g
   when String
     require 'Etc'
     gid = Etc.getgrnam(g).gid
   end

   File.chown(uid, gid, file)
end

Cheers,

Emiel

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Emiel van de Laar