rsync file permissions on windows

(from http://www.samba.org/ftp/rsync/rsync.html)

In summary: to give destination files (both old and new) the source permissions, use --perms.

To give new files the destination-default permissions (while leaving existing files unchanged), make sure that the --perms option is off and use --chmod=ugo=rwX (which ensures that all non-masked bits get enabled).

If you'd care to make this latter behavior easier to type, you could define a popt alias for it, such as putting this line in the file ~/.popt (the following defines the -Z option, and includes --no-g to use the default group of the destination dir):

    rsync alias -Z --no-p --no-g --chmod=ugo=rwX

Cygwin's "posix" security has caused me lots of problems with Windows NTFS file permissions - even using --no-perms with rsync.

I found that newly-created files/folders don't properly inherit default permissions, but every file/folder ends up with lots of <not inherited> entries in the Windows file/folder Advnanced security tab. (And this problem is not just rsync-related).

I found this related post and this link both very helpful in how to resolve these problems using the noacl option in cygwin's /etc/fstab file. The downside of this solution is that cygwin loses the ability to set file/folder permissions, but in many cases this is not important.

(Googling this topic you'll probably find references to setting the CYGWIN=NONTSEC environment variable, but this is for cygwin v1.5 and doesn't work in cygwin v1.7 onwards.)