How to copy the permissions of a file to another?

Solution 1:

You can use a file as a reference file for both chown and chmod

chown --reference=index.php patch.log
chmod --reference=index.php patch.log

It's all in the man pages btw

chown

--reference=RFILE use RFILE’s owner and group rather than specifying OWNER:GROUP values

chmod

--reference=RFILE use RFILE’s mode instead of MODE values

Solution 2:

If there's any possibility of extended ACLs on the files in question, it's better to use getfacl/setfacl:

getfacl index.php | setfacl --set-file=- patch.log