#6 Directory ownership not saved

[Rohan Carly]

I've found that flexbackup does not correctly preserve
the UID/GID of directories, despite the use of "tar --
same-owner". This seems to be due to the interaction
between "find" and "tar".

The problem can be fixed by dropping the "-depth"
argument to find, so that the directories appear in the
file list ahead of the contents of the directories.

I was able to fix the problem by commenting out the
following line in the file_list_cmd() subroutine:

$cmd .= "-depth ";

I use flexbackup v1.2.1, GNU find 4.1.7 and GNU tar
1.13.25.

[Charlie Brady]

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> This seems to be due to the interaction
> between "find" and "tar".

I'm interested in what lead you to that conclusion. What are
the observations?

Are you backing up/restoring a root file system? If the
contents of /etc/passwd changes midway through a tar
restore, there's a chance that uid/gids will change. Before
the update, files and directories will get the uid/gid
corresponding to the named user and group from the old
/etc/passwd. After the update, they'll get the uid/gid from
the new passwd file.

If you post your original observation - what uid/gid do you
see, and what do you expect, and which files, directories,
etc, then someone can diagnose exactly what the problem is.

I suspect that the -depth just appears to work because of
the change of sort order, and doesn't necessarily completely
fix the problem.

[Filippo Carletti]

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Summary should be "Directory ownership not restored".
Probably a bug in tar. If tar extracts a file in a directory
that doesn't exist, it creates the directory with a "default
owner" of root and it doesn't restore original ownership
when it encounters that directory into the tar ball.

True, it's a find+tar interaction problem.
And true, not using -depth solves the problem becuase find
traverses filesystems before descending into dirs by default.

[Filippo Carletti]

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It's a tar bug.
I can reproduce with tar-1.13.25-4.7.1 but tar-1.14-4
behaves correctly.

[Charlie Brady]

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> I can reproduce with tar-1.13.25-4.7.1 but tar-1.14-4
> behaves correctly

tar-1.13.25-4.7.1 seems to work correctly for me if I use
--overwrite while extracting. See
http://contribs.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=259 for details.

[Charlie Brady]

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Filippo could you please change Subject to something like:

-depth is wrong when creating tar archive

Hmmm, perhaps -depth is always wrong.

Thanks.