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jrdioko
Asked: 2012-02-28 18:19:39 +0800 CST

rsync encounters chgrp errors despite --no-g

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I am using rsync to sync a directory to a USB-mounted device. That device automounts with myuser:root ownership. When I rsync my directory (that has myuser:myuser ownership) with -a, I get many of the following errors:

rsync: chgrp "filename" failed: Operation not permitted (1)

I tried adding --no-g after the -a option (since in this case I don't care about setting the group), but the errors persist. What do I need to do to stop rsync from trying to chgrp everything?

permissions rsync usb chgrp

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    FAT does not have permissions; you could try either re-mounting the device with different owner/group/umask, or expanding the archive flag and removing

    • "preserve permissions" flag -p
    • "preserve groups" flag -g
    • "preserve symlinks" flag -l
    • "preserve special & device files" flag -D

    Essentially rsync -rt is good enough for a FAT target.

    The lazy option would be sudo rsync -a $target $dest 2> /dev/null (run as root to try and force the group change, ignore error messages).

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