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
