Files – How to Back Up and Restore File Permissions

aclbackupfilespermissions

Is there a way to back up and restore file ownership and permissions (the things that can be changed with chown and chmod)?

You can do this in Windows using icacls.

What about access control lists?

Best Answer

You can do this with the commands from the acl package (which should be available on all mainstream distributions, but might not be part of the base installation). They back up and restore ACL when ACL are present, but they also work for basic permissions even on systems that don't support ACL.

To back up permissions in the current directory and its subdirectories recursively:

getfacl -R . >permissions.facl

To restore permissions:

setfacl --restore=permissions.facl

Related Solutions

Bash – Maintain (or restore) file permissions when replacing file

Instead of using mv, just redirect cat. For example:

TMP=$(mktemp)
modifyfile "$original" "$TMP"
cat "$TMP" > "$original"

This overwrites $original with the contents of $TMP, without touching anything at the file level.

File Permissions – Understanding Mode Ending in @ or +

+ means that the file has additional ACLs set. You can set them with setfacl and query them with getfacl:

martin@martin ~ % touch file
martin@martin ~ % ll file 
-rw-rw-r-- 1 martin martin 0 Sep 23 21:59 file
martin@martin ~ % setfacl -m u:root:rw file 
martin@martin ~ % ll file 
-rw-rw-r--+ 1 martin martin 0 Sep 23 21:59 file
martin@martin ~ % getfacl file 
# file: file
# owner: martin
# group: martin
user::rw-
user:root:rw-
group::rw-
mask::rw-
other::r--

I haven't seen @ yet personally, but according to this thread it signifies extended attributes, at least on MacOS. Try xattr -l on such a file.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – Maintain (or restore) file permissions when replacing file

File Permissions – Understanding Mode Ending in @ or +

Related Question