I especially needed to move some photos to my FAT32 mount, with the specific intention of retaining the file creation date and times. The correct command is "cp -p" where the "-p" flag means "preserve".
So we try:
$ cp -rp ../../cdrom/070915 .
cp: preserving times for `./070915/070915_P1250210.JPG': Operation not permitted
cp: preserving times for `./070915/070915_P1250211.JPG': Operation not permitted
$ ls -la 070915/
total 5344
drwxrwx--- 2 root plugdev 32768 2007-09-20 17:47 ./
drwxrwx--- 34 root plugdev 32768 2007-09-20 17:47 ../
-rwxrwx--- 1 root plugdev 593386 2007-09-20 17:47 070915_P1250210.JPG*
-rwxrwx--- 1 root plugdev 596410 2007-09-20 17:47 070915_P1250211.JPG*
The problem here is that the file creation date should be sometime on the 15th of September. NOT today. Did a google, and it brought me to this nugget of information:
This forum post:
if your own user id does not match the 'virtual' user-id, cp can not change the file date back to file date the source file.So I changed the /etc/fstab file. Im quite disturbed by the new UUID usage instead of the ole fashioned /dev/hda access:
The solution is clear - find out your user id (XXX), mount the partition with uid=XXX, and all the files on that partition belong to you - even the newly created ones. This way cp -a can set the original file date.
This works, of course, only for ONE user (and root).
# Entry for /dev/sda5 :
UUID=41BD-AB60 /media/M vfat defaults,gid=users,utf8,umask=007 0 1
to
UUID=41BD-AB60 /media/M vfat defaults,uid=1000,gid=users,utf8,umask=002 0 0
Please note the changes in bold. A quick remount:
# umount /media/M
# mount -a
and copy:
# cp -rp ../../cdrom/070915 M/Photos/
Gives us:
# ls -la M/Photos/070915/070915_P1250210.JPG
-r-xr-xr-x 1 yky users 593386 2007-09-15 09:47 M/Photos/070915/070915_P1250210.JPG*
woohoo!
yk.
