Re: [Sheflug] pax / tar

[Alex Hudson <home [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 21:37, Alan Dawson wrote:
> I've looked at the man pages and feel more confused now.  And whats "The GNU
> folks, in general, abhor  man  pages,  and  create info  documents instead. " 
> all about.

You have to 'info tar' rather than 'man tar'. info pages are a superior
documentation system, more like web pages.

> In particular I'm trying to unpack an archive using tar from tomsrtbt  - which
> isn't GNU tar but a wrapper for pax.  Unfortuately for me the archive I'm trying
> to unpack says use 
> tar --numeric-owner -xvzf file.tar.gz
>
> and tomsrtbt tar doesn't have the --numeric-owner option

It won't unzip it either, IIRC - you need to pipe out of gzip. There's
something in the tom's docs about this.

> I can't get my head around what --numeric-owner actually does and which pax
> setting reproduces that. 

It means (off the top of my head) rather than set the owner to the name
of the file owner (say, 'alex'), set it to the user id instead. If I
have systems A and B, although I might have user 'alex' on both they
could have different user ids - 100 on A, 1001 on B for example.
--numeric-owner will set based on the number, not name, at a guess.

Cheers,

Alex.

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