Rob Walker wrote: > [RGW] Hm, looks simple... Why isn't this part of "cp -a" ?
You have to understand the history of things. In the classic unix world, a file has an owner, a group, a mode, and several timestamps. >From the standpoint of what "cp -a" can manipulate portably, that's basically it. All of those things are neatly returned by stat(3) and are easily settable/copyable across various filesystems. Extended attributes and/or ACLs are a relatively new introduction -- 'new' relative to the fact that traditional unix filesystems are more than 30 years old. They are also inherently very filesystem and operating system-specific: everybody does it slightly differently. Check out this overview of the subtle differences of a dozen different platforms' ACL APIs: <http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=blob_plain;f=doc/acl-resources.txt;hb=HEAD>. It's very hard for a general program like 'cp' to know about all these various ACL APIs, let alone have any idea how it would go about translating the semantics of one to another, which would be required for copying across two different filesystems. Remember that 'cp' comes from GNU coreutils which is a set of generic tools that target dozens of various *nix-ish platforms, whereas the implementations of the getfacl and setfacl commands come from Cygwin itself which has the specific knowledge of Windows NT ACLs. > [RGW] This differs from my experience. Many Windows tools are able to > (built to?) twiddle +R and overwrite. They do not seem to be able to > handle when the ACLs deny them permission, though. Again, attributes have zero to do with security or permissions. They are just a few extra advisory bits that the application (or C runtime) is free to interpret in any way it wants; they offer nothing in the form of OS-enforced restrictions. The Cygwin feature of using the 'backup privilege' to emulate root semantics is about bypassing ACLs, not attributes. Brian -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
