Re: extracting tar with nonexistant users

["Jens B. Jorgensen" <jjorgens@bdsinc.com>]

ljk@carib-link.net wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I tried extracting a tar tape on a machine which did not
> have the same users as the machine on which the tar tape was
> created, it resulted in all the files created being owned by root.
> 
> I would have expected that it should have created the files
> with the same uid/gids as on the original machine.
> 
> Is this normal ?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Lennard

Tar normally munges the permissions (I think using your current
umask) and makes all the files created belong to the user running
tar. That is normal behavior. If you want the permissions/user-ids
to be preserved (and no, it won't make a darn bit of difference if
the users aren't defined on the machine, as it's the user-id number
which is set on the file, and it doesn't have to be in /etc/passwd)
then use the '-p' parameter for tar.

-- 
Jens B. Jorgensen
jjorgens@bdsinc.com