From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1754638AbcHBVx3 (ORCPT ); Tue, 2 Aug 2016 17:53:29 -0400 Received: from mail-oi0-f49.google.com ([209.85.218.49]:35523 "EHLO mail-oi0-f49.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751831AbcHBVxU (ORCPT ); Tue, 2 Aug 2016 17:53:20 -0400 Subject: Re: Please don't replace numeric parameter like 0444 with macro To: Linus Torvalds , Pavel Machek , Greg Kroah-Hartman , Heiko Carstens References: Cc: Baole Ni , Russell King - ARM Linux , "linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org" , Linux Kernel Mailing List , chuansheng.liu@intel.com From: Rob Landley Message-ID: <8f441710-caa7-b746-0556-bde89dea52f2@landley.net> Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2016 16:53:11 -0500 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.2.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On 08/02/2016 03:58 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote: > [ So I answered similarly to another patch, but I'll just re-iterate > and change the subject line so that it stands out a bit from the > millions of actual patches ] > > On Tue, Aug 2, 2016 at 1:42 PM, Pavel Machek wrote: >> >> Everyone knows what 0644 is, but noone can read S_IRUSR | S_IWUSR | >> S_IRCRP | S_IROTH (*). Please don't do this. > > Absolutely. It's *much* easier to parse and understand the octal > numbers, while the symbolic macro names are just random line noise and > hard as hell to understand. You really have to think about it. Posix even specifies the numeric value for each macro in the chmod command's extended description: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/chmod.html Rob