How to copy the permissions of a file to another?

Question

Say I have two files:

-rw-rw-r--  1 webapp webapp   215 Jun 21  2012 index.php
-rw-rw-rw-  1 root   root      58 Dec 17 11:02 patch.log

I would like to give patch.log the same permissions as index.php.

I can do it manually:

chown webapp:webapp patch.log
chmod 664 patch.log

But this should be part of a script, where I don't necessarily know what the exact permissions of index.php are.

Is there a way to copy permissions of a given file to another file?

Downvoter, care to explain? – BenMorel Dec 17 '13 at 11:50 — BenMorel, Dec 17 '13 at 11:50

score 12 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 17 '13 at 11:44

12

You can use a file as a reference file for both chown and chmod

chown --reference=index.php patch.log
chmod --reference=index.php patch.log

It's all in the man pages btw

--reference=RFILE use RFILE’s owner and group rather than specifying OWNER:GROUP values

--reference=RFILE use RFILE’s mode instead of MODE values

answered Dec 17 '13 at 11:44

user9517

Interesting. Never seen that before. But if you can read octal permissions... – ewwhite Dec 17 '13 at 11:56
1

It's be really nice if GNU manpages specified when they added arguments/functionality outside of the POSIX standard. This works in GNU `chown` and `chmod`, but not in any other OSes. – Chris S Dec 17 '13 at 16:55
@ChrisS: The question is tagged linux ;) – user9517 Dec 17 '13 at 16:57

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 17 '13 at 16:50

5

If there's any possibility of extended ACLs on the files in question, it's better to use getfacl/setfacl:

getfacl index.php | setfacl --set-file=- patch.log

answered Dec 17 '13 at 16:50

MikeyB

2 Answers2