Unix already has "attributes"...

[John Mackin]

In article <547 at h-sc1.UUCP> thau at h-sc1.UUCP (robert thau) writes:

> One thing to keep in mind:  execute-only privilege.  The only real reason for
> it that I can think of is spoiler-hiding for adventure games,

No, there is an excellent reason for it.  If you keep your executables in
/bin and such places execute-only, your users can't copy them (don't ask
me why they WANT to copy them, but I can assure you they do -- at least
ours do).  You get proliferation of versions if they do it.  You install
a new version of whatever and people complain about bugs you thought
you'd fixed, and they turn out to be running a private copy of the
old version.  Annoying, to say the least, as well as a waste of disk
space.

John Mackin, Basser Department of Computer Science,
	     University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
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