[ale] weird tgz shenanigans

[James P. Kinney III]

The original files were packaged by some one with the same UID/GID as
Michele. Remember, these are just some numbers that the running OS
associates with what is in /etc/passwd. If the UID of the files doesn't
match anyone in /etc/passwd, they won't show up with a user name in the
UID field, just a number.

When the UID of the tarball is set to a valid UID on the machine, the
entire tarball will unwrap with that UID unless flags are set that force
it to otherwise. There a flags that can force this on the package making
side as well.

On Thu, 2002-12-05 at 17:01, Jeff Rose wrote:
> 	Now this doesn't make sense.  Someone please explain this.  michele has
> a different gid and uid than root.  michele does not have the same
> permissions as root.  If I set either/both the group or owner to
> root/jeff, michele can't untar.  But of course root can.  If I set
> owner/group to the user walter or jeff and extract, the files belong to
> walter or jeff respectively. But when the owner/group is set to root and
> untarred by root, the files are still owned by michele!  This is not the
> case for all .tgz files I download.  Why do some files do this?  How can
> I predict which files will do this?
> 	Could it be that tar wants to set the permissions as close to what they
> were when tarred as possible and it just so happens Michele's is the
> closest id?  This seems very strange to me.
> 	
-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics) <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 



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