On Thu, Nov 22, 2007 at 12:31:24PM -0700, John E Hein wrote:
> 
> >From gtar docs...
> 
> `--numeric-owner'
>      This option will notify `tar' that it should use numeric user and
>      group IDs when creating a `tar' file, rather than names.
> 
...
> 
> 
> Maybe we should just turn on --numeric-owner by default.  I can't
> think of any good reason why we shouldn't.  On extraction for restore,
> it won't really help to have the username in the archive.  I don't
> think gtar supports translating username to a different uid if the uid
> differs on the extracted system.
> 
> Hmmm... after testing, it seems that gtar does look up the username on
> extraction and change the uid accordingly.  If the username on the
> system where you untar has a different uid than on the system where
> the archive was created, gtar will extract and chown a file such that
> the extracted file has the new uid (unless you extract with
> --numeric-owner).
> 

Now that you mention this I recall a long ago discussion that noted
this behavior as one of several reasons that only root should be
able to do recovery/restore.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
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