rsync error failed to set times on foo bar Operation not permitted

Question

I m getting a confusing error from rsync and the initial things I m finding from web searches  as well as all the usual chmod ing  are not solving it   rsync  failed to set times on   foo bar   Operation not permitted  1  rsync error  some files could not be transferred  code 23     at  SourceCache rsync rsync-35 2 rsync main c 992   sender 2 6 9    It seems to be working despite that error  but it would be nice to get rid of that

User · Answer

The issue is probably due to  foo bar not being owned by the writing process on a remote darwin  OS X  system   A solution to the issue is to set adequate owner on the remote site   Since this answer has been voted  and therefore has been hopefully useful to someone  I m extending it to make it clearer   The reason why this happens is that rsync is probably trying to set an arbitrary modification time  mtime  when copying files   In order to do this darwin s system utime   function requires that the writing process effective uid is either the same as the file uid or super user s one  see opengroup utime s page  Check this discussion on rsync mailing list as reference

User · Answer

This error might also pop-up if you run the rsync process for files that are not recently modified in the source or destination   because it cant set the time for the recently modified files

User · Answer

I had the same problem  For me the solution is to delete the remote file and let rsync create again

User · Answer

As  racl101 has commented on an answer  this problem might be related to the folder owner  The rsync command should be done by the same user as the folder owner s one  If it s not the same  you can change it   chown -R userCorrect  remote path to foo bar

User · Answer

This happened to me on a partition of type xfs  rw relatime seclabel attr2 inode64 noquota   where the directories where owned by another user in a group we were both members of  The group membership was already established before login  and the whole directory structure was group-writeable  I had manually run sudo chown -R otheruser group directory and sudo chmod -R g rw directory to confirm this   I still have no idea why it didn t work originally  but taking ownership with sudo chown -R myuser group directory fixed it  Perhaps SELinux-related

User · Answer

I ve seen that problem when I m writing to a filesystem which doesn t  properly  handle times -- I think SMB shares or FAT or something   What is your target filesystem

User · Answer

It could be that you don t have privileges to some of the files   From an administrator account  try  sudo rsync -av     Alternately  enable the root account and sign in as root   That should allow you to completely hose your system and brute force your rsync    -   I m not sure if the above mentioned --extended-attributes will help  but I threw it in too  just for good measure

User · Answer

If  foo bar is on NFS  or possibly some FUSE filesystem   that might be the problem   Either way  adding -O   --omit-dir-times to your command line will avoid it trying to set modification times on directories

User · Answer

The problem in my case was that the  receiver mountpoint  was incorrectly mounted  It was in read-only mode  for some extrange reason   It looked like rsync was copying the files  but it was not  I checked my fstab file and changed mount options to default  re-mount file system and execute rsync again  All fine then

[rsync] rsync error: failed to set times on "/foo/bar": Operation not permitted

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