[Devel] Re: [PATCH 1/3] lutimesat: simplify utime(2)

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Friday 26 January 2007 21:41, Andrew Morton wrote:
> I'm somewhat surprised that this wasn't done earlier.  I wonder if there's
> some subtle reason why this won't work.   How well tested is this?

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/functions/utimes.html
lists a slight difference between utime and utimes in the handling
of EPERM/EACCESS:

> The utimes() function shall fail if:
> [EACCES] Search permission is denied by a component of the path prefix;
>  or the times argument is a null pointer and the effective user ID of the
>  process does not match the owner of the file and write access is denied.
> [EPERM] The times argument is not a null pointer and the calling process'
>  effective user ID has write access to the file but does not match the
>  owner of the file and the calling process does not have the appropriate
>  privileges.
>
> The utime() function shall fail if:
> [EACCES]  Search permission is denied by a component of the path prefix;
>  or the times argument is a null pointer and the effective user ID of the
>  process does not match the owner of the file, the process does not have
>  write permission for the file, and the process does not have appropriate
>  privileges.
> [EPERM] The times argument is not a null pointer and the calling process'
>  effective user ID does not match the owner of the file and the calling
>  process does not have the appropriate privileges.

I don't really understand how that should be implemented in different
ways, but it might be the reason that we have separate functions.

	Arnd <><