hi-

(1) if all my app files in a jar have my user name
and my permission inside the jar what
happens when i deploy the jar to
another users system (download).
the jar itself will also have my regular
account user name.

(2) can you make it so the files have no owner?
or group,i've seen files like that in an archive

(3) or do you just leave it as root:root.
does everyone run a root user and root group?

i dont know anyone that uses linux and only have
my 1 machine. this part i cant test myself.

once i get this piece straight i can go ahead
and hook up the java webstart kind of soon.

thanks for any tips. i tried searching but
i must not be putting in the right keywords.
jim

There are various implementations of tar (GNU tar, BSD's tar, star) , and they have different behavior.

1) It is the UID that is stored in the tar archive, so user's will see the user name from their own system that corresponds to the stored UID

2) No

3) You can do 0:0 (group 0 on BSD is "wheel"). That is probably most convenient.

(1) if all my app files in a jar have my user name
and my permission inside the jar what
happens when i deploy the jar to
another users system (download).
the jar itself will also have my regular
account user name.

Think of it like a zip file. When another user unzips the files, it's usually going to be owned by them, not whoever zipped them up. This you can test yourself by creating another user.

(2) can you make it so the files have no owner?
or group,i've seen files like that in an archive

Not that I know of and what would be the advantage of that?

(3) or do you just leave it as root:root.
does everyone run a root user and root group?

Running as root is just bad security. Most people will use sudo or su as root when they need such privileges that only root has.

Just as an FYI: "usually" is better characterized as depends up tar version, depends on options selected at extract time, depends on archive mode. We shouldn't think of computers as probabilistic; for many, they do seem to have a mind of their own.

Just make a test with a random .jar and see that the original
permissions are not visible :

ls -l /media/cdrom/"path-to-apps"/
-r--r--r-- 1 knudfl root 188464 dec 1 2005 Sokuku-en-0.98-beta.jar
(example from Linux Format LXF 76 DVD)

If I unpack to /home/"user", all files are : 'knudfl : knudfl'

Rgds

But he's not using tar, it's a jar file. I only used zip as a reference since tar and jar's are sort of the same concept.

And computers don't have a mind of their own, we tell them what to do. That's why there's options and also why I mentioned to test it for them self.

thanks so much for all of this help.

very cool :-)

i am going to try to set up
a new user. that should work. then i can
observe and try out some of the suggestions.

thanks again,
jim

Oops, my bad. You are correct. I got lost in the noise.