Re: curious behavior in cp --- is it a bug?

[Aaron Peterson]

Paul,
What file systems involved? My initial thought was that  FAT32 won't
do the permissions, but it looks like you're describing a subtlety
beyond what I know.

Others,
   I'm wondering if our extended attributes and permissions can be
saved in a special file to give low feature file systems preservation
of our good stuff. Probably a project on sourceforge that addresses
this

=

On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 7:52 PM, Paul E Condon <address@hidden> wrote:
> This is an directory ownership issue.
>
> On a host which I've named 'gq', I am copying a file structure the is
> rooted a /db2/chkpnt. All the files under /db2/ (and /db2 itself) have
> ownership root:root
>
> I copy the whole structure to an external HD that is mounted at on
> another computer, hostname 'big'. On big the HD is mounted at
> /media/WDP-5/
>
> The connection from gq to big is via sshfs. /media on big is mounted
> at /var/mnts/big/media on gq. All directories and mount points along this
> path have ownership root:root.
>
> On WDP-5, there are three levels of directories. I am putting the copy
> of /db2/chkpnt into /media/WDP-5/mystuff/chkpnt/
>
> The command that I use to do this is:
>
> cp -au --backup=none /db2/chkpnt /var/mnts/big/media/WD-5/mystuff/
>
> This copies the whole chkpnt file structure into mystuff, but I get
> error messages. One of them is, e.g.;
>
> cp: failed to preserve ownership for \
> /var/mnts/big/media/WDP-5/mystuff/chkpnt/gq/etc/resolv.conf: \
> No such file or directory
>
> Why error messages? I find that ownership of several directories are
> not root:root, namely:
>
> /media is pec:pec
> /media/WDP-5 is pec:root, and
> /media/WDP-5/mystuff is pec:pec .
>
> I'm user pec on both hosts. When I chown these three directories to
> root:root, the error messages stop, so I call this curious behavior,
> as I'm not stopped from progress until it's fixed.  But is this
> reasonable behavior? Why is cp noticing and commenting on ownership of
> objects that it is not copying? It should not, in fact, have attempted
> to change ownership of any of these three directories. And it didn't
> attempt it.  I know because it was running as root, and certainly
> could have done chown.
>
> Nothing about the actual wording of the message indicates that it
> succeeded in doing its job, anyway.
>
> By the way, the contents of /db2/chkpnt were generated by several
> invocations of cp -au ... that put backup copies of /etc /home , etc.
> into chkpnt. I like the numbered backup feature. Good Show!
>
> --
> Paul E Condon
> address@hidden
>
>
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