Tar error

[Kim Porter]

couldn't get uname for uid 9175. there is no user 9175 and never has been. Also when I do a find it does not come up with any files owned or touched by this user or the gid 42424. I know I can ignore it but it is taking up thousands of lines in my tar file.

[Michael Tully]

Hi,

I've seen this many times when you do a download from a site a compressed tar archive.
They may come with a uid and gid that was owned
on their system. This will explain where the
mysterious numbers come from. I know that
downloading an apache version from apache has
this exact problem.
Try:

find / -user "9175" -print
find / -group "42424" -print

HTH
Michael

[Patrick Wallek]

The messages that are coming up are informational messages and do NOT occupy any extra space in the tar file.

As was said, this is almost surely due to a downloaded tar archive that had that specific uid. No harm anywhere with this message.

[Deepak Extross]

Kim,
What command are you using to untar the files? Far as I know, "tar xf " does not crib about undefined users and groups.
In any case, there is an upside to tarballs from public ftp sites having unreasonably high UIDs and GIDs - if you had a user "johndoe" with UID 9175, then a listing of the tar files whould show "johndoe" as the owner. Which could create a little bit of confusion.
Just my $0.02.

[Shannon Petry]

The easiest way to fix the file system error is untar the tape as a user and NOT root. The way tar is built, a non root user assumes ownership of the files when extracted and their umask is applied. As root, original modes are restored.

If you have to re-create the tape, again as a real user (make sure they can read what needs to be put on tape.

Last, there is a nice way to find all the files not owned by anyone will take a bit of work, but I'll point you in the direction.
find / -depth -exec /bin/ls -l {} \; >>/somebigarea/bigfilelist
*Syntax is critical!
If you look at the file, you should be able to see the columns dealing with user/group. (You'll probably have to widen your terminal though...).

awk has a very nice builtin from C (isnum) so that you can cat the file, pipe to awk, if user/group is a number then changemod it! :)

It's a big chore, and always test scripts before you run them!!!!!!

Have fun, and remember the beauty is that there are many unique ways to solve any problem!

Shannon

[John Carr_2]

Hi

totally agree with the guys why these UID's exist.

I change my false ID's to real ID's using the following command

find . -user "9175" -exec chown real_user_name {}\;

find . -group "42424" -exec chgrp real_group_name {} \;

If you do this tar will stop complaining.

If you have lots of false UID's and GID's let us know and we will expand to accomodate.

good luck
John.