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 <[email protected]> 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 > [email protected] > > > _______________________________________________ > Bug-coreutils mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils > _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
