Re: file ownership
Ethan Benson <erbenson@alaska.net> writes:
> On Tue, Sep 19, 2000 at 09:44:45PM +0100, john gennard wrote:
> > In Potato, I'm installing qt-2.0.1 from a tar.gz. After uncompressing,
> > unpacking and re-naming the directory 'qt', I checked its permissions
> > and found owner and group given as '508'. On a previous occasion,
> > when compiling some other software (forgotten what), I noticed its
> > owner and group was shown as 'staff'.
> >
> > I presume this is the work of the software producer and not Debian.
> > Can anyone explain the significance of '508' and say if I can safely
> > change ownership or if some other course of action is desirable.
Owner and group IDs are numeric. When you do something like `ls -l`
the numeric IDs are converted to the corresponding users and groups
according to /etc/passwd and /etc/group. Apparently, you don't have
entries for ID 508, so it does not get converted.
> > Grateful for any assistance.
>
> this happens when you extract tarballs as root (which you should not
> do) most people who create tarballs don't do so under fakeroot so the
> ownership is root.root.
Extract *any* tarball as a normal user. It will set owner and group
to that of the user extracting it. Most software will build from a
normal user account. Installing in system locations will require more
privileges though.
> chown -R root.root qt
> chmod -R u+rwX,go=Rx qt
Hmm, suppose there's a set uid script in qt ... Well, you gotta be
root to do this anyway, so I guess you already know that you may be
asking for trouble ;-)
> me, when i create tarballs for distribution i always check that
> everything is world readable and not writable by anyone but owner, no
> extranious execute bits set. then run fakeroot tar -zcvpf foo.tar.gz
> foo
>
> this way all the ownership in the tarball is set to root.root as it
> should be.
--
Olaf Meeuwissen Epson Kowa Corporation, Research and Development
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