I'm trying to install colordiff
in a custom directory because I do not have sudo
privileges. I did make the directories hard-coded in the Makefile as stated in the README, but I'm getting this error:
...
chown root.root /share/edu-mei/colordiff/1.0.13/etc/colordiffrc
chown: changing ownership of `/share/edu-mei/colordiff/1.0.13/etc/colordiffrc': Operation not permitted
make: [install] Error 1 (ignored)
...
Changing this file ownership is not really a problem (probably the reason that the author ignores this). However I'm not familiar with this usage of chown
.
The manpage from chown says that the command syntax is:
chown [OPTION]... [OWNER][:[GROUP]] FILE...
chown [OPTION]... --reference=RFILE FILE...
But the command executed is chown root.root $file
.
What does the syntax with a dot rather than a colon mean?
Best Answer
It sets the user and group of
$file
toroot
(as inchown OWNER.GROUP FILE...
). It's the same as callingchown root:root $file
, but an older form.The period was replaced by a colon, giving
chown OWNER:GROUP FILE...
as documented, because periods could potentially appear in user/group names.