My first reaction to this is that it isn't necessary because root can
just su to another user before installing, but then I remembered that
cpio has a "-R id" option to assign a different user id and owner for
convenience. Maybe going that route would be better, and it is handy
sometimes for root, especially when copying locally. Oh, I see that GNU
cpio has a long name equivalent of --owner for -R, and allows setting the
group separately with the syntax of OWNER:GROUP or OWNER.GROUP. So maybe
Doug's suggestion is fine. I would suggest that if the owner is specified
but the group isn't then it should default to the owner's group in the
password file rather than preserving the original group.
- Dave Dykstra