On Thu, 2005-04-14 at 02:41, Paul Howarth wrote: > 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? GNUtar has an --owner=USER option if you want to set the ownership as the archive is created, and when files are extracted by root it should default to setting the file ownership to match the user named in the source if a matching user name exists on the destination system. Perhaps the users didn't exist at the time of extraction so the numeric uids were used instead. -- Les Mikesell les@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx