Re: address@hidden: Lisp file permissions after install]

[Paul Eggert]

[Sorry about the delay; my mailbox overflowed.]

> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
> Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2001 12:33:52 -0500
> 
> The easy way to fix this is to do chown with -R.  But I think that -R
> in chown is a fairly new feature--perhaps a GNU-only feature, or
> perhaps a POSIX feature--and it might not work universally.
> 
> Does anyone have another suggestion?

The following command should be portable even to older hosts:

find DIR -exec chown user {} ';'


> I'm surprised that the command
> 
>         && (echo "Copying $${dir} to $${dest}..." ; \
>             (cd $${dir}; tar -chf - . ) \
>               | (cd $${dest}; umask 022; \
>                    tar -xvf - && cat > /dev/null) || exit 1; \
> 
> does not make the new files with root as owner.
> GNU tar has an option `--same-owner' that seems to ask
> for such behavior, which would seem to imply that the
> default behavior should be something different.
> 
> Eggert, can you tell us anything about this?
> Are there other tar versions which preserve the owner by default?

That's the typical behavior, when tar is invoked by root.  In some
Unix implementations tar has an -o option to disable this, but -o has
a different meaning with GNU tar.  So it is a bit of a portability
problem.