Ethan Benson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Tue, Sep 19, 2000 at 09:44:45PM +0100, john gennard wrote: > > In Potato, I'm installing qt-2.0.1 from a tar.gz. After uncompressing, > > unpacking and re-naming the directory 'qt', I checked its permissions > > and found owner and group given as '508'. On a previous occasion, > > when compiling some other software (forgotten what), I noticed its > > owner and group was shown as 'staff'. > > > > I presume this is the work of the software producer and not Debian. > > Can anyone explain the significance of '508' and say if I can safely > > change ownership or if some other course of action is desirable.
Owner and group IDs are numeric. When you do something like `ls -l` the numeric IDs are converted to the corresponding users and groups according to /etc/passwd and /etc/group. Apparently, you don't have entries for ID 508, so it does not get converted. > > Grateful for any assistance. > > this happens when you extract tarballs as root (which you should not > do) most people who create tarballs don't do so under fakeroot so the > ownership is root.root. Extract *any* tarball as a normal user. It will set owner and group to that of the user extracting it. Most software will build from a normal user account. Installing in system locations will require more privileges though. > chown -R root.root qt > chmod -R u+rwX,go=Rx qt Hmm, suppose there's a set uid script in qt ... Well, you gotta be root to do this anyway, so I guess you already know that you may be asking for trouble ;-) > me, when i create tarballs for distribution i always check that > everything is world readable and not writable by anyone but owner, no > extranious execute bits set. then run fakeroot tar -zcvpf foo.tar.gz > foo > > this way all the ownership in the tarball is set to root.root as it > should be. -- Olaf Meeuwissen Epson Kowa Corporation, Research and Development
