Patch without changing owner and group

Question

I've got a file owned by a non-root user:

# ls -l example.php
-rw------- 1 foo bar ... example.php

I just applied a patch with a command like

patch -p0 <<-EOF
--- .../example.php.orig 2012-06-20 15:07:13.000000000 +0200
+++ .../example.php  2012-06-20 15:43:05.000000000 +0200
...
EOF

as root and the target file user and group were both changed to root. I couldn't find any reference to this in the man pages.

Is there a way to leave the file ownership as before without using su, sudo, or chown?

su seems unable to specify a group.
sudo -u foo patch ... runs fine, but sets the wrong group.
sudo -u foo -g bar patch ... returns Sorry, user root is not allowed to execute '/usr/bin/patch' as foo:bar on hostname. This might be because user foo is not a member of group bar.
chown would mean having to store the permissions before running patch, adding another two lines of code.

Can you show an example with file ownership and the exact command you run? I'm a bit surprised to see that user root is not allowed to execute ... as foo. That would indicate you are logged in as root and then executing sudo. Usually you run sudo to gain elevated privileges. So to help you we need to know who owns the file, who is executing the patch command etc.

poige · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-20 13:35:53Z

up vote 7 down vote accepted

patch creates new file, that's why it holds effective user credentials.

A workaround: use patch -o to have temporary file created, then simply cat tmp file to original file.

answered Jun 20 '12 at 13:35

poige
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1 Answer