Some of my previous blog posts about a little discovery have save me time in the past.

I made a tar of some system integration scripts we wrote for Vista 3 and brought them over to a Vista 8 test box to work on updating them for this new version. A decision we made earlier to change the userid came to light.

Using gtar -zxvf file.tar.gz gave me the wrong owner. Thankfully the people who made tar long ago solved this problem with –owner. Look for it in the man pages. Using gtar -zxvf file.tar.gz --owner newid gave me the files I needed with the right owner.

Also, thankfully, the old owner account was still on the box so I go into it and remove the files before extracting with the new id. Hopefully my Systems people (who read this blog) will not kill that account or our access to it until after this project is done?
🙂