Can't open Miranda programming language tar ball Mac El Capitan

Question

I'm trying to:

sudo tar xpzf mira-2044-x86_64-Darwin.tgz -C /

I am in the correct directory (my Downloads folder) but I get this error:

./usr/: Can't set user=0/group=0 for usrCan't update time for usr tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.

What does this error mean in this context?

Answer 1

Option p of tar means preserve permissions.

tar is attempting to set file permission, ownership and modification time of some existing directories. In MacOS, /usr is owned by root:wheel but the archive has it owned by root:root.

Unfortunately, when running tar as superuser, the default is to preserve permissions. So you cannot turn this off.

Fortunately, k option of tar will skip overwriting existing files or directories. You can tell tar not to overwrite /usr, /usr/local, /usr/local/bin and any directories that you already have.

Modification time is always restored when a file or directory is restored. Option k will already prevent modification time to get updated when it tells tar not to overwrite existing directories/files. It is still better to know that the option m tells tar not to update the modification time of a file/directory.

You should now be able to install miranda by running:

sudo tar xmpkvzf mira-2044-x86_64-Darwin.tgz -C /

That added v (verbose) option is just to let you see what are being extracted.