files are copied but setting time stamp fails

[Matt McCutchen]

On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 12:08 -0700, Wayne Davison wrote:
> Setting the current time may be allowed where setting an arbitrary
> time is not (for instance, I know of an OS where directories are treated
> that way).

On Linux, you only need to be able to write a file to set its access and
modification times to the current time, but you need to own it to set
its times arbitrarily, as rsync does when preserving times.  This makes
me think that rsync can write the destination files but doesn't own
them.

You said you are using vfat, which explains everything.  Vfat cannot
store ownership, so all of the files on a vfat partition have the same
user and group owners; these owners can be set via the "uid" and "gid"
mount options.  Other users (like the one rsync is running as) might
have write permission, but even if they create files, those files will
belong to the partition-wide user owner.

If you want to preserve times, you should change either the user running
rsync or the user owning all the files on the partition so that they
match, or you should use a different filesystem.
-- 
Matt McCutchen, ``hashproduct''
hashproduct at verizon.net -- http://mysite.verizon.net/hashproduct/