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Full Discussion: What's the best way to check file permissions before moving files if needed?
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting What's the best way to check file permissions before moving files if needed? Post 303036856 by Cacializ on Sunday 14th of July 2019 03:13:35 PM
Old 07-14-2019
What's the best way to check file permissions before moving files if needed?
Hello,
I would like to know if it's a good practice to check the file permissions of the contents of a directory before moving them. For example:
Code:
mv -- "$directory"/* "$directory"/.[!.]* "$directory"/..?* "$destination"

The variables $directory and $destination contain the path to an existing directory. The problem is that I don't have control of the user's directory who runs the script so, in theory, the files may not have the needed permissions to be moved, and the directory is required to be empty. What's a good way to check if every file was moved successfully?

The first thing that came to mind is to check the exit status of the command:
Code:
mv -- "$directory"/* "$directory"/.[!.]* "$directory"/..?* "$destination" || exit 1

However, this doesn't mean a file couldn't be moved, because it can also exit because of a non-existing directory entry as a result of the glob. I also thought of checking if the directory is actually empty:
Code:
for entry in "$directory"/* "$directory"/.[!.]* "$directory"/..?*
do
    if [ -e "$entry" ] || [ -L "$entry" ]
    then
        printf "A file couldn't be moved.\n" 1>&2
        exit 1
    fi
done

But I'd like to know if this check is unnecessary. I also thought about checking if every single file has the needed permissions before using the mv command, but I'm afraid that would be superfluous.
Thanks in advance.
Last edited by Cacializ; 07-14-2019 at 04:32 PM..
 

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LEARN ABOUT CENTOS

dh_fixperms

DH_FIXPERMS(1)							     Debhelper							    DH_FIXPERMS(1)

NAME

       dh_fixperms - fix permissions of files in package build directories

SYNOPSIS

       dh_fixperms [debhelperoptions] [-Xitem]

DESCRIPTION

       dh_fixperms is a debhelper program that is responsible for setting the permissions of files and directories in package build directories to
       a sane state -- a state that complies with Debian policy.

       dh_fixperms makes all files in usr/share/doc in the package build directory (excluding files in the examples/ directory) be mode 644. It
       also changes the permissions of all man pages to mode 644. It removes group and other write permission from all files. It removes execute
       permissions from any libraries, headers, Perl modules, or desktop files that have it set. It makes all files in the standard bin and sbin
       directories, usr/games/ and etc/init.d executable (since v4). Finally, it removes the setuid and setgid bits from all files in the package.

       When the Rules-Requires-Root field has the (effective) value of binary-targets, dh_fixperms will also reset the ownership of all paths to
       "root:root".

OPTIONS

       -Xitem, --exclude item
	   Exclude files that contain item anywhere in their filename from having their permissions changed. You may use this option multiple
	   times to build up a list of things to exclude.

SEE ALSO

       debhelper(7)

       This program is a part of debhelper.

AUTHOR

       Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>

11.1.6ubuntu2							    2018-05-10							    DH_FIXPERMS(1)
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