POSIX, NFS, CPIO/TAR

[Moderator, John S. Quarterman]

From: Doug Gwyn <uunet!smoke.brl.mil!gwyn>

In article <7674 at portia.Stanford.EDU> karish at forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish) writes:
>  The POSIX 1003.1 standard says that the types used for user and group
>  IDs (uid_t and gid_t, respectively) are to be `arithmetic types'.  An
>  implementation or application that assumes that that the values are
>  always positive is broken.

RONG.  IEEE Std 1003.1 defines "group ID" and "user ID" to be NON-NEGATIVE
integers in Section 2.3.  This is in conformance with existing practice
that Sun gratuitously ignored in their NFS implementation.

Volume-Number: Volume 17, Number 101