If you need to create a file that has the exact same ownership and permission bits as an existing file, the ‘reference’ flag provides a convenient shortcut. For example, if you had a file named ‘myoriginal’ that had the exact ownership and permissions required for a new file ‘mynewfile’, you could use the commands below … Bash: cloning the ownership and permissions of another file using reference
When troubleshooting an issue where ownership and permissions of a file or directories is questioned, we often go straight to chown/chmod and recursively set these values. However, this touches every file so if you are still in investigative mode it would be better to use “stat” to simply check the ownership and permissions first. If … Linux: Use stat to verify permissions and ownership
File copying is about more than just content – the metadata for user ownership, permissions, and timestamps is often critical to retrieval and function. Below are the relevant switches for metadata preservation when using cp, rsync, and tar. These typically need sudo in order to work.