Re: Bug#340236: coreutils: cp -p to nfs destination fails to preserve timestamps

[Paul Eggert]

The Wanderer <address@hidden> writes
in <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2005-12/msg00199.html>:

> I copied a directory hierarchy across a network to a shellfs mount,

What's a shellfs mount?  Sorry, I've never heard of shellfs.

> When they arrived at the far end, all of the ones whose filenames
> included a single-quote character returned the "preserving
> timestamps: Operation not permitted" error,...  What's more, every
> file which had been copied now proved to have also had its timestamp
> updated.

That sounds very much like an error in the shellfs implementation; it
shouldn't matter at all whether the file names contain a single-quote
character.  You can verify this by using "strace" (GNU/Linux) or
"truss" (Solaris) on the cp -p command.  Something like this:

strace -o foo.tr cp -p source dest

and then look at foo.tr to see what utimes and/or futimes did.

> If there's anything I can do to help resolve this,

If the problem is limited to shellfs (whatever that is), then I'd file
a bug report with the shellfs maintainers, giving a test case that
will let them reproduce the bug.  It sounds like they have at least
two bugs, one involving file name quoting and the other involving time
stamps.