Hello The attachment has this same text but might be easier to read than an email. I don't know if this is a NTFS-3g bug, or a coreutils cp bug, or neither, or both. I've asked the list, which hasn't been able to help apart from confirming that someone else has the same problem. Problem Trying to cp -pu from an NTFS partition to an ext3 partition, the timestamps look OK, both with terminal ls -l and in nautilus (Date Modified and Date Accessed). The -u option says that the same file should not get copied again unless it's changed. But it does get copied again, and again Just to remind, -p same as --preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps -u, --update copy only when the SOURCE file is newer than the destination file or when the destination file is missing So here's the longer version with too many details. For a couple of years I've been doing cp -puv -t $dest $source from one ext3 partition to another, no problem. But now I've copied my whole data disk to an NTFS partition on a USB portable hard drive. NTFS so I can use it at work. I want to copy files from this NTFS partition to an ext3 destination with timestamps intact, so that next week when I do the same thing, I only copy new or changed files. Demo* code is source=/media/data/aaa_S500_data/* # the NTFS partition dest='/home/garry/Desktop/junk' # a ext3 partition cp -puv -t $dest $source Demo* Really I look at 30GB and 20,000 files, that's why I don't want to be copying the same thing repeatedly. Here is a demo source directory address@hidden:~$ ls -l /media/data/aaa_S500_data/ total 64 -rwxrwxrwx 1 garry garry 38254 2010-12-02 06:20 elephantGreen.ico -rwxrwxrwx 1 garry garry 5978 2010-10-25 17:27 elephant.ico -rwxrwxrwx 1 garry garry 69 2010-11-30 05:55 readme.txt -rwxrwxrwx 1 garry garry 766 2002-10-14 04:27 wdlogo.ico -rwxrwxrwx 1 garry garry 5978 2010-10-25 17:27 wooly-mammoth.ico address@hidden:~$ So into an empty directory, '/home/garry/Desktop/junk' I copy address@hidden:~$ cp -puv -t '/home/garry/Desktop/junk' /media/data/aaa_S500_data/* `/media/data/aaa_S500_data/elephantGreen.ico' -> `/home/garry/Desktop/junk/elephantGreen.ico' `/media/data/aaa_S500_data/elephant.ico' -> `/home/garry/Desktop/junk/elephant.ico' `/media/data/aaa_S500_data/readme.txt' -> `/home/garry/Desktop/junk/readme.txt' `/media/data/aaa_S500_data/wdlogo.ico' -> `/home/garry/Desktop/junk/wdlogo.ico' `/media/data/aaa_S500_data/wooly-mammoth.ico' -> `/home/garry/Desktop/junk/wooly-mammoth.ico' address@hidden:~$ Then without changing any files in $source, and if I do cp -puv -t '/home/garry/Desktop/junk' /media/data/aaa_S500_data/* again, nothing should be copied. But the two files that were created / altered on the NTFS partition _AFTER_ it got created with gparted & partimage get copied again. address@hidden:~$ cp -puv -t '/home/garry/Desktop/junk' /media/data/aaa_S500_data/* `/media/data/aaa_S500_data/elephantGreen.ico' -> `/home/garry/Desktop/junk/elephantGreen.ico' `/media/data/aaa_S500_data/readme.txt' -> `/home/garry/Desktop/junk/readme.txt' address@hidden:~$ and again address@hidden:~$ cp -puv -t $dest $source `/media/data/aaa_S500_data/elephantGreen.ico' -> `/home/garry/Desktop/junk/elephantGreen.ico' `/media/data/aaa_S500_data/readme.txt' -> `/home/garry/Desktop/junk/readme.txt' here is my /etc/fstab proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 UUID=a49e1eb6-72bc-465d-9852-ce99403d303f / ext3 errors=remount-ro 0 1 UUID=f13a83d6-fdfd-4dc7-b67c-a3d47c9fd727 none swap sw 0 0 UUID=07B3B28C580F4BEA /media/data ntfs-3g defaults,umask=000,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 1 #UUID=07B3B28C580F4BEA /media/data ntfs-3g defaults,relatime,umask=000,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 1 #UUID=07B3B28C580F4BEA /media/data ntfs defaults 0 1 UUID=c1841d07-7991-4e9c-8d35-969cb49ccf28 /media/toybox_data ext3 defaults 0 2 I tried touch --reference '/media/data/aaa_S500_data/newfile' '/home/garry/Desktop/junk/newfile' but that made no difference. What I'm using:- ubuntu 10.04 ntfs-3g 2010.3.6 #came with ubuntu ntfs-3g 2010.10.2 #installed today GNU Bash-4.1 cp in GNU coreutils 7.4 So is this a proper bug that I should put on launchpad? Looks like it to me, but I'm amazed if nobody else found it first. regards ------------------------------------ Garry Trethewey ------------------------------------