Subject: Change of ownership?

From: Mitchell Brown <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Sep 1997 10:39:30 -0700 (CDT)

I have noticed something in the past few weeks about Pine 3.96.  I am
unsure if this is the expected behavior or not.  I often times become root
to do some modifications to the system and sometimes forget to change back
after I am done.  I use "su root" (not "su - root") so my directory and
all my environment variables are the same.  I have noticed that if I
access pine as root, the ownership of my .pinerc file is changed from
mbrown.user to root.sys.  The next time I start a new month, therefore
moving sent folder to the previous month (more often), my choice is not
written and I get the same option each time I start pine.  This became
very annoying and frustrating trying to figure out the reason behind it.  

My question is this.  Is this the normal behavior?  What is the reasoning
behind automatically changing the ownership of the .pinerc file to
root.sys?  Thanks in advance.

Mitchell Brown

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From: Edward M Greshko <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Sep 1997 08:27:44 +0800 (GMT)

> root.sys?  Thanks in advance.

Yes. this is normal...and hasn't a thing to do with pine.

After you've "su root" do a "touch x" then do an "ls -l x"....who is the
owner?  Answer, "root".

You need to do some homework on Un*x.

Ed

-- 
Edward M. Greshko                  Technical Manager, Electronic Commerce
                                   Control Data Asia/Pacific Region
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From: Jeff <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Sep 1997 20:35:11 -0400 (EDT)

> You need to do some homework on Un*x.

Actually, I think the original question had to do with "why is Pine
*changing* the ownership of the .pinerc file".

Pine has a few built-in safeties to prevent accidental invasion of privacy
or destruction of data. This is just one of those measures. When you start
Pine aftering su'ing to root without changing your environ, Pine looks at
the $HOME variable to determine the home directory, and looks at the
.pinerc file contained therein. If the .pinerc file is owned by someone
else, or writeable by someone else, Pine takes measures to fix this.
Problem is, Pine doesn't quite handle this with 100% success.

-jeff