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Re: Resolving '????????' users and groups


Larry Hall (Cygwin) wrote:
On 3/2/2010 9:21 PM, Wes Barris wrote:
Dave Korn wrote:

<snip>


Do you *actually* own the files? What kind of drive is this; network or
local? NTFS or FAT?

This is a second drive in my XP system. The drive contains all of my data. One of the folders/directories on this drive is what I use as my home directory. It has an NTFS filesystem. I map my home directory on this drive to a drive letter so it shows up in Windows Explorer as a mapped network drive even though it is a disk physically on the same system. This is a relatively new disk (and computer). I copied my all of my data from my previous computer onto this disk in this new computer.

I've always thought that I actually owned the files. The Windows
security tab says that I own them. It wasn't until I installed
Cygwin that I had any reason to believe otherwise.

I see that I can do a "chown -R wes" on a directory and it makes
me the owner as far as Cygwin is concerned. Windows Explorer
says that I am the owner before and after doing this. I can do
this to fix all of the files. It's just a bit curious to me that
Cygwin says I am not the owner but Windows does.

How was the data copied? By whom?

I copied the data. I put both disks into one computer and used Windows Explorer to drag folders from one disk to another.

The simple answer to the question of why Cygwin doesn't know you're
the owner is likely to be that the SID of the owner of these files is
not listed in '/etc/passwd'.

Thanks. That is actually how this thread got started. My SID in my /etc/passwd file does not match that of my files. Evidently, the way I copied my files is incompatible with Cygwin.

Get it in there using 'mkpasswd' and
Cygwin will show you that user as the owner.

mkpasswd shows an SID that is evidently different from that of my files.

Since you changed the
owner already, this is likely moot at this point though.

If I re-install Windows on the same computer does the SID of the machine change? Or is the SID tied to the hardware? If it changes with a new install that would explain my problem.

--
Wes Barris
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