Owner 1049, Group 101

[xerid]

I was looking around my system (specifically the new kernel source dir)
and I noticed that the directories are of owner 1049
and group 101. I looked in both the group
and passwd files, but no such owner or group
exists. These files/directories were copies from
the tarball unpack. Could this be a result of that?

[Craig McPherson]

Whenever you tar up a bunch of files, they retain their user and group ownership. On the machine where those files were originally tarred up, they were owned by that user and group ID. No two systems will have the exact same sets of user and groups, so when you untar the files on your machine, if they're owned by user #1042 and you have no user #1042 on your system, you'll just see "1042" as the owner.

[Craig McPherson]

There's an option for tar that forces it to reset the uid/gid of the files it unpacks to the uid/gid of the user doing the unpacking. I forget what option it is. It's in the manpage, if you really care. Or you can just use chown -R to reset all the ownerships manually.