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From: john@basser.oz (John Mackin)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: Re: Unix already has "attributes"...
Message-ID: <416@basser.oz>
Date: Fri, 30-Aug-85 04:59:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: basser.416
Posted: Fri Aug 30 04:59:11 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 1-Sep-85 12:45:01 EDT
References: <3398@decwrl.UUCP> <2000018@ccvaxa> <1314@eagle.UUCP> <2636@sun.uucp> <467@baylor.UUCP> <547@h-sc1.UUCP>
Reply-To: john@basser.oz (John Mackin)
Organization: Dept. of Comp. Science, Univ. of Sydney, Australia
Lines: 19
Summary: Keep that execute-only!

In article <547@h-sc1.UUCP> thau@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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