Im having a rather odd issue with tar. Im currently developing a howto on how to make your own distro from a lfs linux system but every time i try and tar up the system the permissions are not saved in the tar file.

the command i am using is

tar -cvjpf test.tar.bz2 /archive/test/


test is the location of the copied operating system.


this does not give me errors but when I extract with this command on another pc
tar -xjvpf test.tar.bz2

the permissions are off by the user and group owners

as far as the read and write permissions they are correct so am i missing something here or just doing it wrong..... any ideas ?

tar czpvf


or read the option --preserve-permissions from 'man tar'

isn't that like the same thing he's already doing except with gzip instead of bzip2??

Oh! yeah... my mistake...

exvor, you need to make sure the user/group exists on the destination machine... but more importantly: at extraction time you need to use an account capable of setting those permissions, like root, for example...

Ok got the permissions thing worked out i wasent extracting as the root user but now a new issue. I cant chroot into the temp system it gives me a kernel too old error ?