[Python-Dev] Extending os.chown() to accept user/group names (original) (raw)

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Wed May 25 15:41:46 CEST 2011

On May 25, 2011, at 10:24 AM, Sandro Tosi wrote:

before opening an issue to track the request, I'd like to ask advice here about this: extend os.chown() to accept even user/group names instead of just uid and gid.

On a Unix system, you can call chown command passing either id or names, so it seems (to me at least) natural to expect os.chown() to behave similarly; but that's not the case. I can see os module wants to be a thin wrapper around OS syscalls and chown(2) accepts only uid/gid as input, so what would be best: extend os.chown() or provide a chown() function in shutil module for this purpose?

I think it would be a nice feature, and I can see the conflict. OT1H you want to keep os.chown() a thin wrapper, but OTOH you'd rather not have to add a new, arguably more difficult to discover, function. Given those two choices, I still think I'd come down on adding a new function and shutil.chown() seems an appropriate place for it.

Cheers, -Barry

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