On Nov 20, 10:59pm, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
} Subject: Re: postinstall fixes failed: gid sendmail uid
>On Sun, Nov 20, 2005 at 10:49:04PM +0100, Pavel Cahyna wrote:
>> On Sun, Nov 20, 2005 at 10:42:49PM +0100, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
>> > > > tar silently defaults to root:wheel (or whatever uid/gid tar is running under)
>> > > I just looked to the system where I did the install, and saw that for
>> > > those files, tar (pax, actually) chose the "correct" UID and GID, not
>> > > root:wheel.
>> > It did not on my system, but I tried on 1.6.2. 2.x and 3.0_BETA
>> > obviously have this user name so it's not easy to do this check here.
>> Haven't you forgot -pe ?
>No, I checked again, I really did tar -p
>Hum, maybe these users exists on the boot floppy's passwd/group files, so
>tar can work from here ? From what I can see in the sources, it does.

So far as I know, when you run tar as root, it will restore the uid/gid
that was stored in the archive.  If those uids/gids don't exist in your
passwd/group, `ls -l` will show a numeric ID.  It's not an error for the
unknown IDs to not be in the passwd/group files.  

~Steve