From: utzoo!decvax!cca!HOLSTEGE@Cit-20@sri-unix
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Title: chown
Article-I.D.: sri-unix.2976
Posted: Fri Aug 27 22:12:46 1982
Received: Wed Sep  8 06:34:50 1982

Date: 23 Aug 1982 1448-PDT
One reason for not allowing users to chown their files is that tar,
at least on UNIX-TS, attempts to chown the files it extracts from tape
to their original owner. Needless to say, if you are transferring from one
machine to another, this is disaster. You wind up making a directory tree
owned by someone else, possibly a non-existent someone else. Worse, usually
the directories are mode 755, so you can't even delete any of it. All you
can do is get the superuser to fix it all. This makes tar pretty painful
for moving software from one machine to another.
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