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 alone
> Wrong. 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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