Retaining File Permissions With Git

Retaining file permissions with Git

The git-cache-meta mentioned in SO question "git - how to recover the file permissions git thinks the file should be?" (and the git FAQ) is the more staightforward approach.

The idea is to store in a .git_cache_meta file the permissions of the files and directories.

It is a separate file not versioned directly in the Git repo.

That is why the usage for it is:

$ git bundle create mybundle.bdl master; git-cache-meta --store
$ scp mybundle.bdl .git_cache_meta machine2: 
#then on machine2:
$ git init; git pull mybundle.bdl master; git-cache-meta --apply

So you:

• bundle your repo and save the associated file permissions.
• copy those two files on the remote server
• restore the repo there, and apply the permission

How to restore the permissions of files and directories within git if they have been modified?

Git keeps track of filepermission and exposes permission changes when creating patches using git diff -p. So all we need is:

1. create a reverse patch
2. include only the permission changes
3. apply the patch to our working copy

As a one-liner:

git diff -p -R --no-ext-diff --no-color \
    | grep -E "^(diff|(old|new) mode)" --color=never  \
    | git apply

you can also add it as an alias to your git config...

git config --global --add alias.permission-reset '!git diff -p -R --no-ext-diff --no-color | grep -E "^(diff|(old|new) mode)" --color=never | git apply'

...and you can invoke it via:

git permission-reset

Note, if you shell is bash, make sure to use ' instead of " quotes around the !git, otherwise it gets substituted with the last git command you ran.

Thx to @Mixologic for pointing out that by simply using -R on git diff, the cumbersome sed command is no longer required.

Can git retain file owner, permissions, ACLs, and file attributes on a local Windows NTFS machine?

GIT is a platform-independent code management tool, and can be run on numerous different operating systems. As a result, it is necessarily indifferent to any particular platform's notions of security or access control information. Security metadata about a file in Windows would be meaningless in, for example, a Linux environment, and vice-versa.

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