[100208] in RedHat Linux List
Re: unpacked tarball owners
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ramon Gandia)
Wed Nov 18 19:54:29 1998
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 15:52:53 -0900
From: Ramon Gandia <rfg@nook.net>
To: redhat-list@redhat.com
Resent-From: redhat-list@redhat.com
Reply-To: redhat-list@redhat.com
Greg Fall wrote:
>
> tar clearly has some feature/s I don't understand.
>
> I often dl tarballs as a regular user, then have an xterm with 'su -'
> running in it, which I use to copy the tarballs from user areas to
> /usr/local/targz ("cp" instead of "mv" because ownership goes to root
> like I want it to that way). Typically, root then goes to
> /usr/local/src and unpacks things; e.g. "tar xzvf ../targz/foo.tar.gz"
>
> The owner of the files and directories that are unpacked is hardly ever
> root, however. Nor is it necessarily the user who owns the desktop
> the 'su -' xterm runs in. Does tar use ids attached to the tarball to
> assign it an owner? I see that tar has a --same-owner option, but I
> don't use it.
>
Nor would you want to in 99% of the cases. The reason is that a
lot
of programs, daemons, etc. need to run with certain ownerships and
permissions. Often the owner is "nobody", or "ftp", or "httpd"
and the like. If you change any of this, you will break the
package.
Installing from tarballs is just like installing from RPM's,
except
that sometimes with tarballs you have to apply a bit of creative
thinking as to where the thing is going to fit.
My experience with tarballs is that they need to have a README
file
with those details in it, so you can peruse the README file
*before*
unpacking the tarball. Most aggravating, but there it is.
--
Ramon Gandia ----- Owner & Sysadmin, Nook Net
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