Copy permissions to identical tree on linux / unix

Solution 1:

I just learned a new and simple way to accomplish this:

getfacl -R /path/to/source > /root/perms.acl

This will generate a list with all permissions and ownerships.

Then go to one level above the destination and restore the permissions with

setfacl --restore=/root/perms.acl

The reason you have to be one level above is that all paths in perms.acl are relative.

Should be done as root.

Solution 2:

If you have the source and dest, you can synchronize your permissions with rsync -ar --perms source/ dest

It will not transfer the data, just permissions...

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Solution 3:

One thing you could do is use the find command to build a script with the commands you need to copy the permissions. Here is a quick example, you could do a lot more with the various printf options, including get the owner, group id, and so on.

$ find /var/log -type d -printf "chmod %m %p \n" > reset_perms
$ cat reset_perms
chmod 755 /var/log
chmod 755 /var/log/apt
chmod 750 /var/log/apache2
chmod 755 /var/log/fsck
chmod 755 /var/log/gdm
chmod 755 /var/log/cups
chmod 2750 /var/log/exim4
...

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Solution 4:

It can be done with the following shell line:

D1=foo; D2=foo2; for entry in $(find $D1  -exec stat -f "%N:%Mp%Lp" {} \;); do $(echo $entry | sed 's#'$D1'#'$D2'#' | awk -F: '{printf ("chmod %s %s\n", $2, $1)}') ; done

simply set the right value for D1 and D2 variables, point them to the source and destination directories, run and the dirs will have permissions in sync.