Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2006 14:12:23 -0400 From: Gabriel O'Brien <obrieng@nm.cbc.ca> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD 5.4: 'cp -p' does not behave as documented Message-ID: <44F33207.2070401@nm.cbc.ca>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Hi folks,
FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE-p6 i386
We have a script in our environment that is used to back up our mail
logs. In essence it does:
cp -p /var/log/maillog.0.bz2 /stats/maillogs/maillog-testcopy.bz2
According to the cp man page:
<snip>
-p Cause cp to preserve the following attributes of each source file
in the copy: modification time, access time, file flags, file mode,
user ID, and group ID, as allowed by permissions.
If the user ID and group ID cannot be preserved, no error message
is displayed and the exit value is not altered.
<snip>
However, when I run this script or when I do a cp -p manually I am seeing:
cp: chown: /stats/maillogs/maillog-copy-test.bz2: Permission denied
For the record the user does not actually have permissions to do the
chown, however we would still like to use 'cp -p' in order to preserve
the remainder of the attributes and according to the docs this should be
possible. Does anybody have any insight?
I note this issue does not appear to exist on our FreeBSD 6.1 boxes.
cheers,
Gabriel O'Brien
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?44F33207.2070401>