On Wed 12 Mar 2003, jw schultz wrote: > On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 01:27:32PM +0100, Paul Slootman wrote: > > This is a patch against the manpage to clarify what the --perm option > > does and does not do. > > If we are going to embellish this description it would be > good to make it clear that the behavior of rsync in this > regard is the same as that of cp. > > Most of those complaining about this behavior fail to > understand it is consistent with cp, scp, rcp et al.
Not quite true, I'm afraid... $ ls -l /tmp/ps* -rw-rw-r-- 1 paul paul 1266 Mar 12 14:49 /tmp/ps1 $ cp /tmp/ps1 /tmp/ps2 $ ls -l /tmp/ps* -rw-rw-r-- 1 paul paul 1266 Mar 12 14:49 /tmp/ps1 -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 1266 Mar 12 14:51 /tmp/ps2 Note how the permissions are different! That's because cp pays attention to the umask. Only with the -p option does cp preserve the permissions, even if the destination doesn't exist. $ cp --version cp (coreutils) 4.5.2 Written by Torbjorn Granlund, David MacKenzie, and Jim Meyering. Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. > If i may suggest... > > This option causes rsync to update the permissions > of existing destination files to be the same as the > source files. Like other file copy utilities new > destination files will receive the same permissions > as their source files. Here it's still not clear that the behaviour with new files is the same whether or not the option is specified; that was the original problem. I still think the wording I first used is clearer; if necessary a sentence could be added that the behaviour is the same as other file copy utilities, but I'd be careful about that as I have demonstrated it's not always true, and we also have no idea what file copy utilities the users are accustomed to... Paul Slootman -- To unsubscribe or change options: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html