Copy files without changing owner

Question

How to copy all files from /var/www onto a flash disk without changing owners of folders in the /var/www folder? (Or how to insert the whole /var/www folder into an archive and put it onto a flash disk)

My system:

Debian 6 (Linux PSB1 2.6.32-5-686 #1 SMP Mon Sep 23 23:00:18 UTC 2013 i686)

What filesystem do you have on the flash disk? This will very much depend on that. — terdon, Mar 17 '14 at 15:29

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 17 '14 at 14:00

9

cp -rp /var/www/ /path/to/flash/disk/

From cp manpage:

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

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

answered Mar 17 '14 at 14:00

Tobias

577

it's very unlikely that a flash drive is formatted with ext2/ext3/ext4 – Kiwy Mar 17 '14 at 14:18

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 17 '14 at 14:01

First mount your usb.

 $ mkdir -p /mnt/myusb
 $ mount -t vfat -o rw,users /dev/sda1 /mnt/myusb
 $ mount

After that you can use rsync command to do this wirh -avz arguments

rsync -avz /var/www /mnt/myusb

This will keep permissions, owner and links of /var/www .

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 17 '14 at 14:01

1

You must be root (or have CAP_CHOWN and CAP_FOWNER and probably also CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE, and CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH) in order to do that. Then it is simple: cp -a

answered Mar 17 '14 at 14:01

Hauke Laging

90,279

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 17 '14 at 14:10

0

If your filesystem is capable of preserving the ownership information, then cp -a (archive) preserves all parameters (permission, ownership, links, extended attributes).

answered Mar 17 '14 at 14:10

orion

12,502

1

it's very unlikely that a flash drive is formatted with ext2/ext3/ext4 – Kiwy Mar 17 '14 at 14:19

Copy files without changing owner

4 Answers4