a subtle(?) tar extraction permission problem

[cs at zip.com.au]

On 12:43 27 Jun 2004, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at mindspring.com> wrote:
| On Sat, 26 Jun 2004, Cameron Simpson wrote:
| >I think you'll find the tarball also has "a/b/c" in it too.
| sure, but the attributes of *those* directories don't get changed when 
| i do the extraction.

Odd.

| >1: Don't extract as root?
| not an option.  a single package/tarball might want to put files/dirs 
| in various places, owned by various accounts.

Yucko. Another reason I install non-RPM (or whatever the native package system is)
stuff in /opt, thus:

	http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/css/syncopt.html

Of course, that won't work without a little special fiddling for things what
_need_ particular accounts and odd privileges (eg mail transports or suchlike).

| >2: Note perms, extract, fix perms.
| ouch.  that would work, but it would definitely be a bit messy.

Should automate pretty readily if you peruse the tarball TOC.

| >3: Extract only the files - avoid the directories.
| 
| tempting, but i'm wondering what would happen if the tarball has a 
| directory that doesn't exist yet.  it will have to be created, of 
| course,

Which is easy.

| at which point i'd have to take care of setting its original
| attributes.

Well, you _could_ pull those from the tarball:

	- scan toc, noting files
	- compute needed dirs (all antecedants of file paths)
	- for each dir needed, if [ ! -d "$dir/." ] add the dir to the
	  extract list for the tarball
	- extract

Sounds easy enough to me. Want code?

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

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