Bug 320

Summary:	tar dumps wrong user/group values for users not in /etc/passwd
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	J\|rgen Christoffel <jc>
Component:	tar	Assignee:	Bernhard Rosenkraenzer <bero>
Status:	CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	high
Version:	5.2	CC:	jc
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	1999-03-08 18:02:33 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description J|rgen Christoffel 1998-12-06 23:25:05 UTC

when tar dumps and later extracts files without an owner
listed in /etc/passwd it erroneously uses the owner/group of
the last file which had a valid owner. I had to reconfigure
my boot disk and thus dumped its contents with tar,
installed a fresh Redhat 5.2 and restored the data while the
virgin passwd file from the install was in place.

All user files suddenly belong to root because no user
entries exist in /etc/passwd during the restore.

A work around is to use tar's -o option to create old style
archives. Existing tar files may be extraced with the
undocumented option --numeric_owner. The real solution is to
patch the caching in names.c (sent via separate mail).

Comment 1 Mike Maher 1999-03-08 18:02:59 UTC

added patch and rebuilt for next release.
currently in rawhide.