halo friends,

when i am extracting tar.gz files with command tar xvzf, i am getting a message in every file, cannot change file ownership to uid uid no., cannot change file ownership to gid gidno., & one more thing is showing in that, file ownership of this tar file is 0755, when i am trying to change file ownership with chmod to 0777, it is not permiting me to do this. i think problem is with file permissions. this problem is not with a single package, a lot of package i am trying to extract, all having same problem. neither its a problem of linux vesion, bcaz 1st i am getting this problem in version 4, then i installed version 3, but same problem i get there also. plz tell me what to do.

parveen

Tar preserves the file ownership/permissions from the original source of every file in the tar archive. When you extract a tar archive, tar tries to recreate those ownerships/permissions. The message you are getting indicates that tar cannot recreate those file ownerships/permissions in the environment where you are doing the extracting. There could be a lot of reasons for this. Try extracting as root and then changing the permissions/ownership on the extracted files.