This is the first bug I have submitted, so apologies if I get anything wrong here. Overview I have two filesystems. One filesystem is mounted with the "acl" option and one is not. I want to be able copy files containing ACLs from the filesystem that supports ACLs over to the filesystem that doesn't. I want to preserve the file ownership and permissions, but I want to NOT preserve the ACLs. At the moment there the cp command can sort of achieve this, but it returns an error. STEPS TO REPRODUCE # touch test # setfacl -m u:1234:rw- test # # Assuming that /tmp is not mounted with option "acl" # cp -p test /tmp cp: preserving permissions for `/tmp/test': Operation not supported # cp --preserve=mode test /tmp cp: preserving permissions for `/tmp/test': Operation not supported # # (Only by excluding mode will the operation return success) # cp --preserve=ownership,timestamps test /tmp DESIRED BEHAVIOUR I think it would be highly desirable for cp to offer more granularity on what is preserved by the copy. I would suggest adding: - acl - x_attr Note that rsync does a good job by providing the following options: -H, --hard-links preserve hard links -p, --perms preserve permissions -E, --executability preserve executability --chmod=CHMOD affect file and/or directory permissions -A, --acls preserve ACLs (implies -p) -X, --xattrs preserve extended attributes -o, --owner preserve owner (super-user only) -g, --group preserve group --devices preserve device files (super-user only) --specials preserve special files -D same as --devices --specials -t, --times preserve modification times If only cp could be brought up to the same standard. It is also perhaps worth mentioning that it seems bizarre (and very confusing) that in order to preserve the file mode (e.g. 0644) you need to specify preserve=ownership, not preserve=mode, and in order to preserve the file owner (e.g. mark) you need to specify preserve=mode!! BUILD & PLATFORM I'm pretty sure this issue applied to all flavours of Linux, but I am testing on a derivative of Debian Sarge running on a Sparc processor # uname -a Linux tera 2.6.17.8ReadyNAS #1 Tue Jun 9 13:59:28 PDT 2009 padre unknown