[Chris McDonough, on Sat, 08 Jan 2000] :: - The owner and group of all Martij's product files are :: martijn/martijn. We had some talk lately about how untarring Products :: into the directory tree might lead to the unintended resetting of :: permissions. When I untarred the product, all the files were reset to :: owner/group mcdonc/mcdonc (my user login). I do not know under what :: circumstances tar creates files which have their permissions set to :: their build filesystem's permissions, or whether this is a behavior :: endemic to non GNUtar tar variants or what. I seemed to have no problem :: with gunzip ZFormulator.tgz, tar xvf ZFormulator.tar within the Zope :: homedir. Does anybody have any tips as to when tar decides to write :: files out with their original owner/group bits set instead of :: owner/group set to the untarring user? (yes, I am way too lazy to try :: to decode the WORST man page in history, the GNUtar manpage). You're right; the manpage is hairy. But tar itself is simple. It's probably helpful to remember that tar is, historically, a tape archiver (validated by the fact that if you don't specify the 'f filename' option, tar will assume you want to write to the first tape device). Most tape backups will be performed by root. tar preserves the original owner if you extract as root; otherwise, files will be owned by user (you). In either case, permissions, full directory structure, and symbolic/hard links, are retained.