Baslinux mailing list

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On Mon, 17 Mar 2008, I wrote:

> absence of chgrp in busybox. Is chgrp available as a separate binary in 
> Slack4? If it were, would adding it resolve the problem? Would 
> permissions on pty's still ned to be changed?

Some web research revealed that, in the olden days of Slack4, chgrp was 
part of a group of utilities called fileutils (in more modern time, i.e., 
post-2003, it has become part of coreutils). I suspected I might disrupt 
my BL3 system in major ways by installing fileutils, since it would be 
likely to overwrite parts of busybox. Instead of pkg'ing that tgz file, I 
downloaded, gunzipped, and untarred it. Sure enough, in the resulting /bin 
directory I found the chgrp binary. I copied it from where I had unpacked 
it to the /bin directory on the root of my BL3 testbed. Now I can su to my 
user just like I was able to before rebooting. In other words, I simply 
issue su user and the terminal switches to being run by my user--no need 
to enter a password.

Maybe that business of changing permissions on pty's was unecessary, 
Sindi? Maybe just the addition of chgrp would resolve a lot of those 
user-on-BL3 problems you've been seeing? If you want to try this I can 
send you the chgrp binary. Similarly, I could post it for download at my 
BL3 site. Let me know if you're interested.

Further input on this will be appreciated.

Thanks,
James