[Bug-tar] Re: HP-UX tar -> GNU tar: Archive value -56720837941 is out of uid_t range 0..4294967295

[Paul Eggert]

At Mon, 1 Sep 2003 10:32:44 +0200, <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: ext Paul Eggert [mailto:address@hidden
>> What is pniemima's actual numeric UID?  Is it less than 2**24 (i.e.,
>> 16777216)?  If so, it's a bug in HP-UX tar.

I went back to the POSIX spec, and I was wrong; the actual limit is
2**21 (i.e., 2097152).

> pniemima's UID is 10158843. 

Then it's out of range, and my guess is that all out-of-range UIDs are
represented using the string "-000001" (which is nonstandard).  For
what it's worth, in a similar situation Solaris 8 uses UID 60001,
which is the user ID for "nobody".

What I thing GNU tar should do is to recognize "-000001" as a signal
that the exact uid (or gid) was not representable, and to treat it as
an attempt not to set the uid.  This will require removing the support
for obsolete base-64 headers, but that's OK; it was only in a
briefly-released test version.