On Mon, Nov 20, 2006 at 03:23:34PM -0500, Heitzso wrote:
> Trying to stabilize my sparcstation 20 dual hypersparc 500M
> system on 3.1 and 2006Q3 I ran into a problem.  Sequence was:
>  * ftp download of all 3.1 sparc blat.tgz files
>  * from / dir ran tar -xvfz .../blat.tgz as per doc (all less etc.tgz)

You missed one important option:

     -p, --preserve-permissions, --preserve
                   Preserve user and group ID as well as file mode regardless
                   of the current umask(2).  The setuid and setgid bits are
                   only preserved if the user is the superuser.  Only meaning-
                   ful in conjunction with the -x flag.

Bernd