Re: [Sheflug] pax / tar

["Chris J" <cej [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

And Lo! The Great Prophet Alan Dawson uttered these words of wisdom:
>
> Would that explain the following ..  sorry if its a bit wordy.
> 
...[snippage]...
> 
> An ls -al of the filesystem shows all files to be owned by 64543 and group 
> 64543 rather than names as the owner and groups of files. 
> 
> Previous versions used to say things like owner root, group wheel
> 
> Instead of tar I did a 
> 
> pax -rf /path/to/pebble.tar
> 
> and now everything is owned by root group root,I can set a passwd.  I'm tryin
> g 
> to get some info on
> 

I'd suspect so; storing users is good if you want to maintain usernames 
between systems, but I've /no/ idea what happens if there's a file owned by 
foo, and foo doesn't exist on the target system. Proabably assigns a 
default uid/group - probably nobody (which is usually down in the 65535 
area, or thereabouts).

UID's gurantee that UIDs won't change, but users might, depending on the 
user setup. Which may or may not be important :) But if you have users 
that don't exist, it may be a better policy; consider what may happen if 
you have two (or more) users that don't exist on the target system - pax 
will give the files for the unknown users default ownership, thus you don't 
know who owned file1, file2 etc... at least storing by UID's gives you the 
ability to discern which files are owned by a common user.

But this is supposition as I've never used pax, and guessing how it works :)

Chris...

-- 
\ Chris Johnson           \ NP: Marillion - 06. Incubus
 \ cej [at] nightwolf.org.uk    ~-----,   
  \ http://cej.nightwolf.org.uk/  ~-----------------------------------, 
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