Re: chmod/chown/chgrp behavior change

[Erik Auerswald]

Hi,

On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 11:34:34PM +0100, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> On 16/04/15 23:01, Paul FM wrote:
> > Many years ago I checked and chmod only changed the MTIME of a file if 
> > it needed to make a change to the permissions, now the mtime is changed 
> > on every file (even if no change is needed).
> > 
> > The  -c option works as expected (only tells you if a change was needed 
> > to meet your command.
> > 
> > So is this a bug, or was it changed for a spcific reason ?
> > 
> > Is there a command line option to stop it from doing this?
> > Has this already been fixed (and I just need to update - version info 
> > below).
> > 
> > The chmod distributed with FreeBSD still works as I would expect.
> > 
> > 
> > Note - we found this behaviour changed when trying to figure out why our 
> > incremental backups are so large (it may have been changed for many years).
> > 
> > Thanks.
> 
> Please see http://bugs.gnu.org/15835 for why
> we've decided this needs to be implemented in the kernel.

The respective Debian bug (from 2008) includes three workarounds for
this GNU chmod limitation:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=497514#85

1) find + chmod
2) cfengine
3) setfacl

Thanks,
Erik