Resolving '????????' users and groups

[Wes Barris]

Dave Korn wrote:
> On 02/03/2010 05:57, Wes Barris wrote:
>> I'm trying to find a solution for my files being listed with '????????'
>> as the owner and group:
>>
>> -rw-r--r-- 1 ???????? ????????  137894 2010-02-25 11:34 1536.gff
>>
>> The following page partially addresses this:
>>
>> http://www.cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html
>>
>> It says that:
>>
>> --------------------------
>> If another user (or a Windows group, treated as a user) is not present
>> in /etc/passwd, the uid of that user will have a special value of -1
>> (which would be shown by ls as 65535). The user name shown in this
> 
>   As we discussed earlier, -1 is now a 32-bit value, so shows up as
> 4-billion-something rather than 65535 these days, but apart from that this is
> what is happening.
> 
> 
>> case will be '????????'.
>> --------------------------
>>
>> I would like to modify the /etc/passwd file so that it shows me
>> as the owner of these files instead of '????????'.  
> 
>   No, you don't want to do that.  You only want it to show you as the owner of
> those files if you actually *are* the owner of those files, and the way for
> that to happen is for your user account in the windows domain to actually be
> the owner of those files, and to be linked to your cygwin uid/gid via the
> /etc/passwd file.
> 
>   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.

>     cheers,
>       DaveK
> 
> 
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-- 
Wes Barris
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