Hi, I've used the following code in an update script. I don't want cp to change permission since the target directory has default ACLs in place that will set the correct permissions, but I want to keep timestamps so once upon a time I added "--preserve=timestamp --nopreserve=mode,ownership". I've tested without mode now and it seems permission are fine. mkdir a touch a/a cp -rfT --preserve=timestamps --no-preserve=mode,ownership a b If I remove mode from the arguments to --no-preserve it exits 0, but if you have it it exits 1 and doesn't print anything. It worked in coreutils 8.19 (exit code 0) even though it might not actually do anything. If it's intended behaviour you should at least print some kind of error message. The cause of this change is commit 24ebca61a3a0f10d6cd2800b188b3c034d1c4755 but it doesn't say anything about changing the exit code. -- Florian Pritz