Is there a perl module or a perl builtin that will perform a file copy but preserve the permissions of the copied file?

My advice for copying files is to use system cp => @files, $destination. cp is far more useful than File::Copy::copy that a potential loss in portability (but bare in mind that cp has been ported outside of Unix systems) is well worth the gain.

Abigail

It looks like (so far) the best way to do this is to do all your work on a tempfile ( I like File::Temp myself) version of the file you want to copy and then do your chmod and/or chown on the tempfile and then use rename(). This seems to work correctly.

That doesn't sound like a good idea at all to me. First of all, we're talking about just copying a file, not about any modification. Secondly, using chmod/chown is a lot more work than just using cp. But most importantly, rename will not rename from one device to another.

Abigail

There is a small, but important difference between cp -f on Linux and FreeBSD (and, I assume, other BSDs). On Linux, if the destination file exists, it is overwritten with target permissions preserved. On FreeBSD, target is removed, and the default umask permissions are used when new file is created.

I was bitten bad by that one a year ago when developing a test app on Linux then moving to a FreeBSD environment.

I guess the point is, get into the habit of chmodding (and chowning - depends on context) a file when cp'ing it. If you rely on the OS, you can get bitten when you least expect it.

.02

cLive ;-)

janitored by ybiC: Retitled from "OT: note on cp" for slight improvement in descriptiveness

I had the same problem. I ended up using a system call.

Pax vobiscum,
-Andrés