On Thu, 2012-01-26 at 21:39 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
On Thu, 2012-01-26 at 13:15 -0500, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:On Thu, 2012-01-26 at 13:45 +0000, Pete Biggs wrote:Until just now, I didn't know that it was a tar archive. I was going by this: http://library.gnome.org/users/evolution/3.2/backup-restore.html.en If it's just one tar file, I can change permissions on the tar file. A user program really can't do much with the owner informaton in a tar file.Quite. When the tar file is unpacked the ownership of the files will be set to the user who unpacked it - no other course of action is possible since only the root user can set the ownership of a file to something else (and I really hope you aren't running a mail client as root!)This isn't true; tar can request to not set the ownership, it can just extract the files and leave permissions and ownership aloneWrong. A non-root process can *only* create files owned by the user running it, and 'tar' is of course not setuid.
Wrong! Wait... that's exactly what I said. You tell tar to NOT restore file ownership - this allows you to restore an archive from one system on your new system where you may have a different uidNumber/gidNumber. You can do the same thing with not restoring file permissions and/or other meta-data. Otherwise you will get a bunch of errors, or at least warnings, about not being able to set file ownership.
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