Get the owner of the file (UID & GID)
SilverPlate3 opened this issue · 3 comments
@Lastique
An important functionality that can be added to the library is getting/setting the owner of a file/dir.
In posix its uid & gid.
I think it be a member of boost::filesystem::file_status just like permissions()
If you want it to be for windows as well, we can get the sid.
Would you like me to create a pull request for such functionality?
I think the usefulness of this information would be rather limited, because operating on uid_t/gid_t is very different than on SID. This means that in order this API to be useful, it would have to expose the native id to the user, and the user would have to call system-specific APIs anyway. Also, I don't want windows.h to be included in public headers, so that's a problem.
Do you have a use case where having this API in Boost.Filesystem would be useful compared to calling native APIs directly? That is, do you have a case where adding this API would allow the user's code to become portable without conditional compilation?
As for the implementation, I don't like adding it to file_status. I think, bundling file type with permissions was a mistake to begin with, as there are places in the library where only file type is available and sufficient, and permissions get in the way. Also note that status is one of the most frequently called operations in the library, I don't want to make it more expensive. If this is to be added, it would have to be a separate API.
Indeed we can always just use the native API.
I had a need to get the uid:gid, check it, and then change it.
This required the usage of a native struct + 2 native API calls.
Just though it might be easier if there was a library that offered such functionality, in 2 lines of code. (2 lines of code from the user perspective)
But I get your point.
I'm closing this for now as out of scope. User/group information is very different between POSIX and Windows, and I don't see a use case for providing some portable wrapper.