Solaris cp -P not setting directory ownership when there is a soft link

Question

I've encountered an oddity when doing a copy in Solaris 10 update 10 (sparc, 147440-25).

Here is the setup (done as root):

# cd /tmp
# mkdir foo
# touch foo/thing1
# ln -s thing1 foo/thing2
# chown -hR joe:user foo

If you look at the directory and the link, everything is owned by the user "joe". Now comes the interesting part:

# cp -rpP foo bar

The options to cp here are to recurse, preserve permissions and ownership, and to act on links instead of following them. But when I do this, while the link is copied with the correct permissions, the directory itself, bar, is set to root:root. Is there some reason for this behavior?

It only acts this way if there is a link in the directory. If the directory contains only files all ownership is preserved (I assume because the -P never comes into play).

Answer 1

That's indeed an odd cp behavior I reproduced on the same Solaris release.

Not sure there is a patch for Solaris 10 but the issue is fixed in Solaris 11.1.