Copy files preserving the permissions

You might have come across a situation where your regular usage of the cp command for copying files in your linux box was not enough because while copying you needed to preserve the permissions of the files. Fret not, for help is at hand. Take a look at the man page for cp :

-p     same as --preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps

--preserve[=ATTR_LIST] preserve the specified attributes (default: mode,ownership,timestamps), if possible additional attributes: context, links, all

So that’s it. just use the -p flag to do the copying. Here’s an example where I copy a single file while preserving permissions.

cp -p oldfile ~/new_dest/

To copy a whole directory, I use the -r flag as well.

cp -rp some_dir ~/new_dest/

You can use the –preserve flag to keep whatever attributes you need. For the record, there’s one more related flag

--no-preserve=ATTR_LIST don't preserve the specified attributes

Related posts:

1. Copying files from one unix box to another with scp
2. How to join split files
3. Useful vim commands
4. vimdiff – the cool way to diff for vim users