FreeBSD 5.4: 'cp -p' does not behave as documented

[Derek Ragona]

You need to run this as root so the permissions and ownership all can be 
set.

 	-Derek


On Mon, 28 Aug 2006, Gabriel O'Brien wrote:

> 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
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