File owner

jayadhanesh · 08-18-2014, 06:36 AM

Hi,
I have a tar file. This was copied to my system as root.The ls -l on the tar file shows the owner as root. When I untarred it and did ls -l, instead of root I see
a number for the files that are unatarred. I was expecting the owner for the files
untarred to be root.

Thanks,
D

goumba · 08-18-2014, 06:45 AM

In short, the user with the UID (user ID) who created your tar file doesn't exit on your system.

Code:

user1:x:9001:50::/home/user1
user2:x:9002:51::/home/user1
user3:x:9003:52::/home/user1

The user ID is the third column.

Suppose I were to create a .tar file containing files created originally by "user1", and give you that file. Now you extract that file, but you have no user with the same user id (9001). As a result, the files will show in a listing as owned by user id "9001" and not a name.

You can fix this with chown, as root (group is optional):

Code:

chown -R user.group

rknichols · 08-18-2014, 08:39 AM

When you extract from a tar file as "root", the default is to preserve the permissions and ownership as stored in the archive. You would need to use the "--no-same-owner" option to ignore the saved ownership and leave all files and directories owned by the current user (root).