[lug] SMTP-MAIL: died on signal 11

[Pete Krawczyk]

Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2000 16:11:41 -0600 (MDT)
From: Gary Hodges <hodges at srrb.noaa.gov>
Subject: [lug] SMTP-MAIL: died on signal 11

}2.  I have no idea if this is related, but while I was su'd as root the
}other day, I untarred the newest kernel source, and it assigned ownership
}of the linux directory, and everything below, to another user on my
}machine.  I had su'd in an xterm that was owned by me.  The other user 
}wasn't logged in at the time.  I repeated this two or three times.

It's not related; it's normal.

Tar, by default, assigns ownership of any file it extracts (if it can) to
whoever owned it when it was created in the first place.  That's because
tar was originally used to do backups to tape ("Tape ARchiver") and this
was a desired feature.

If you untar it as yourself, you'll notice you own all the files.  That's
because tar doesn't have permission to change the ownership of the files
to anyone else.

The reason they're assigned to someone else on your systems is because
that person has the same UID as the person who owned the files during the
tar.  I believe that would be UID 1046, but don't take my word on that.
If that person didn't have UID 1046, then you would see a "1046" in the
place of that username.

The usual suggestion for any package, even the kernel, is to untar it as
yourself, compile it as yourself, and install it as root.  However, if you
don't want to do that, you can always chown the files back to yourself (or
root) and continue as normal.

-Pete K
-- 
Pete Krawczyk
  petek at bsod dot net