Re: cp -p does not work if normal users are allowed to chown files

[Jim Meyering]

"PHILIPP, Axel, Dr." <address@hidden> wrote:
> we ran into problems with cp -p on our Linux system when the file system
> is configured to allow chown for normal users (eg
> /proc/sys/fs/xfs/restrict_chown=0). As long as we used the IRIX cp was
> used everything went fine, but with GNU cp we run into errors "cp:
> preserving permissions for `testdir/f1': Operation not permitted"
> because ownership is changed before changing permissions.

Thanks for the report.

First, please tell us which version are you using?
Latest stable is coreutils-6.10:

  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.core-utils.announce/44
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-6.10.tar.gz
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-6.10.tar.lzma