compress and setting owner/group

[John Robert LoVerso]

In an article mkhaw at teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA (Mike Khaw) asks about why
compress does a chown() on the output file.

The reason for this is that if you are running as root and go and compress
a 2Mb file some random joe-user has made, then compress will cleanup
the resultant file by resetting the modification time and owner to the
original file.  O/w, the compressed file would be owned by root, and it
would be less than useful to joe-user.

The intent was *NOT* to have compress installed setuid root.  This would
be a massive security hole.

John R LoVerso
Encore Computer Corp
encore!loverso, loverso at multimax.arpa