rsync -vt shows directories considered?

jw schultz jw at pegasys.ws
Thu Dec 4 07:25:38 EST 2003


On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 09:28:19AM -0800, James Berry wrote:
> 
> On Dec 2, 2003, at 8:24 PM, jw schultz wrote:
> 
> >>But I did some more investigation and have a bit more information:
> >>
> >>(1) This happens only if I don't own the destination directory. If I
> >>own the directory, the time on it gets set. If I don't own the
> >>directory (and even though the group access gives me rwx) the time
> >>doesn't get set. As the same user (not owning the directory, and 
> >>logged
> >>into the remote machine), I can touch the directory to change its date
> >>with no problem. This sounds like maybe we're getting closer to the
> >>root of the problem (or am I misunderstanding something about
> >>permissions or about what rsync is trying to do?).
> >
> >Sounds like another OSX bug.
> 
> Indeed, it seems that the utime() call in darwin fails with EPERM if 
> the target is not owned by the caller. I'll take this up with the 
> darwin folks. The behavior (to fail for this case) matches the darwin 
> man page for  utime(), but doesn't seem to match the opengroup spec for 
> utime().

Very curious that touch works given that it should be using
utime().  Perhaps this is a product of hfs semantics.

I find this deviation from standards troubling.  My
understanding was that they were working from a BSD codebase
so a deviation like this means they changed system call
behaviour without regard to standards.

This is the sort of thing you get when application
programmers are given commit privs on the kernel.  Instead
of looking up the specs and fixing a broken app they
"decide" the syscall is broken and "fix" it.  Result:
porting nightmare--no 3rd party apps.  I'm not saying that
is the case here, only suggesting it resembles such a case
and I hope that isn't what has happened, or if it is they
learn their lesson post-haste.

-- 
________________________________________________________________
	J.W. Schultz            Pegasystems Technologies
	email address:		jw at pegasys.ws

		Remember Cernan and Schmitt



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