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Tar encodes my user name into the tarball. Can I force it to make a fully anonymous tarball?

--owner root replaces only some instances of my user name. Adding USER=root: USER=root tar c --owner root data has no effect.

In short, I wish for:

echo hello world > data; tar c --owner root data | grep "$USER"

to not match.

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
19

What I was missing was --group=root in addition to --owner=root. 

tar -c --{owner,group}=root

(possibly with an optional --numeric-owner) fully anonymizes the archive.

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  • 9
    bash brace expansion {a,b} can be quite confusing. --{owner,group}=root will be expanded to --owner=root --group=root Commented Apr 21, 2016 at 16:09
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    On macOS the command line options are --uid 0 and --gid 0. Commented Mar 9, 2023 at 14:41
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    @Utkonos Thanks Commented Mar 9, 2023 at 15:34
13

You can use --numeric-owner, that will just put your UID (1000 or something similar on most systems) in the file. From man tar:

 --numeric-owner
       always use numbers for user/group names
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  • Thanks. It does the job, though only partly. Looks like cpio (which seems to always encode uids numerically) can anonymize its archives fully via the --owner switch. Commented Apr 21, 2016 at 7:38
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    IIRC --owner only works on extraction/pass-through. If I am wrong you can use cpio's -H option to directly write tar files. Commented Apr 21, 2016 at 7:44
  • It appears to work for -o too. I tried creating a simple archive with and without --owner root:root and then diffed their respective hexdumps. What changed were two two-byte sequence that little-endian-decoded to 0 and my $UID respectively. Commented Apr 21, 2016 at 7:51
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    @PSkocik That is interesting, I just checked man cpio and cpio --help and they both confirm what I commented before. Probably the source was updated, but the documentation wasn't (GNU cpio 2.11) Commented Apr 21, 2016 at 9:24

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