Numbers Ownership after tarring

[Paul Howarth]

On Thu, 2005-04-14 at 13:25 +0900, Mark Sargent wrote:
> Paul Howarth wrote:
> >> ok, but, if I want root or another ownership of the extracted 
> >> file(s), rather than the original owner, can I add that in the tar 
> >> command, or I can only do that with the chown command after 
> >> extracting ..? Cheers.
> >
> >
> > Just use chown.
> >
> > Paul.
> >
> Hi All,
> 
> ok, but, it's a bit redundant, isn't it. Cheers.

No, it would be redundant if tar provided a way to do this in addition
to the option you have of using chown.

The Unix/Linux philosophy has always been to write small, specialised
tools to do specific jobs, and then use scripting tools to "glue" them
together to do bigger, more complex tasks.

chown is the specialised tool for changing ownership of files and tar is
the specialised tool for handling archives. It's good that they're
separate. If you want a facility to do both at the same time, how about
writing a script that uses tar to extract the files and then uses chown
to change the ownership of the files?

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>