Technical Q&A QA1285

Getting owner and group name references for PackageMaker package contents

Q: Is there a way to get a canonical reference of the owner and group names on my system, other than by doing a clean install? I want to be sure that the files that I am handing to PackageMaker to make my install package have the correct settings, as recommended in the Software Distribution document.

A: Yes. You can examine the proper owner/group settings of a particular destination directory in several ways:

1) check the directory in question after a clean install,

2) check the directory after using "Repair Disk Permissions" in Disk Utility,

3) check the settings as described in the receipt for a particular part of a system install. For example, you can check the Library/Receipts/BaseSystem.pkg's BOM (Bill of Materials) with the usr/bin/lsbom command:

lsbom -p MUGsf bomfiles /Library/Receipts/BaseSystem.pkg/Contents/Archive.bom

Details concerning lsbom are in the man page for lsbom; type "man lsbom" in Terminal to see the documentation.

You can search all the Receipts to determine which packages have installed into a particular directory by using the usr/bin/grep command. For example, if you wanted to know which receipts had a record of an installation into the /usr/share directory, you could type:

grep -rs /usr/share /Library/Receipts

[Aug 25, 2003]