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What would it take to get Cygwin and NTFS file permissions to play nice?


I use rsync to back up my Cygwin user directories to an external USB disk drive, formatted as NTFS. This fails from time to time, usually due to permission failures when trying to update the destination files. The Windows permissions of the destination files turn out to be in the wrong order, and to contain extraneous entries. Further checking of other files on the destination drive reveal the same problem with their Windows permissions. Rather that try to correct the Windows permissions of each file in turn, I go as far up the directory tree as needed, and recursively reset all Windows file permissions all the way down. When I then rsync the USB drive back to my user directories, the UNIX permissions of every file are now set to executable. This has the unfortunate effect of granting execute permission on every file restored, even those that are not executable. I gave up on correcting the permissions of the restored files (via a long-running recursive script), and learned to live with the problem. Until now, that is. I thought I'd try "ls --color", and was disappointed to find that almost everything (except directories and symbolic links) came out light green. This happened because almost everything was marked as executable, and this happened because rsync mangled the Windows permissions, which are most easily reset to be the same on all files in a given directory and all subdirectories. These Windows permissions inevitably involve "Full Control" (including execute permission) for somebody, especially the owner. Yeah, I've read the Cygwin doc on this, and I get the feeling that solving it is too difficult/impossible/not worth the effort. For starters, could we at least set the Windows permissions in proper order?


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