Remembering permissions

March 27, 2009 11:06 AM

Is there any FTP client or trickery to remember the UNIX permissions when transferring files from a UNIX machine to a Windows machine?

There would need to be a way to chmod the file on the way back as well.

Bonus points if I can recall the owner and group settings. I don't have any type of shell, just FTP access.

posted by pineappleclock to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Only if you archive the files first with a tool that includes these settings. Zip doesn't, tar does. If you don't have shell access to the source machine, you're probably out of luck. Even unix-unix ftp doesn't preserve permissions, owners & groups - the files on the download end are written by the ftp process with its own owner/group and with whatever default permissions you have set in umask. ftp has no understanding of file perms, it's pretty system-agnostic that way, with the exception of commands like chmod and umask in the client which do nothing on servers where there aren't any suck file perms (i.e. a windows ftp server). But there's no file metadata transferred via ftp.
posted by GuyZero at 11:18 AM on March 27

I haven't tried it, but what about an FTP client that offers "live" editing of the files, like FlashFXP does? You right-click the file in the Remote side and choose Edit. It's downloaded in the background and opened in an editor. When the editor closes the temporary file is uploaded back to the server. It seems like this function would remember the permissions on re-upload.
posted by odinsdream at 12:06 PM on March 27

Permissions are stored by the filesystem, they aren't part of the file itself. So when a file is copied from Windows to Unix, it assumes default permissions because it came from a filesystem that didn't store its permissions. That the file once had permissions in a previous incarnation on a Unix system is beside the point. The permissions aren't "in" the file, they're in the filesystem.

As long as you're FTP'ing files on Windows, you might as well check out WinSCP. It's pretty much the definitive open source FTP/SCP client for Windows.
posted by Loudmax at 10:13 PM on March 28