Changing user identification numbers (UIDs) and group identification numbers (GIDs) in the IBM® AIX® operating system (AIX) isn't one of the more exciting tasks a UNIX® administrator can face. But although it's often seen as a dreadful task, it can be an essential job that an administrator must perform to keep systems in sync within the environment. Because changing UIDs and GIDs can cause serious harm to your environment, you must be careful. The most important thing is understanding what your changes do. Then, you can learn how to make the changes correctly and even automate the process with UNIX scripts.
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....
Comments