Hello, We use rsync to synchronize a large folder hierarchy between servers. Sometimes we notice that the permissions of some directories end up being wrong after rsync is run. The source directory has permissions 755 while target permissions sometimes end up being 700. We are using the --timeout option of rsync, and we have additional watchdog process that will terminate the process if a total running time limit is exceeded. In actual scenario, the folder hierarchy contains thousands of folders. The example below illustrates the problem. $ find mytest/ -ls 1533304 4 drwxr-xr-x 5 mhaa mhaa 4096 Feb 21 21:11 mytest/ 1533322 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 mhaa mhaa 4096 Feb 21 21:11 mytest/foo3 1533321 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 mhaa mhaa 4096 Feb 21 21:11 mytest/foo1 1533318 4 drwxr-xr-x 3 mhaa mhaa 4096 Feb 21 21:02 mytest/foo2 1533320 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 mhaa mhaa 4096 Feb 21 21:02 mytest/foo2/bar 1443165 4 -rw-r--r-- 1 mhaa mhaa 4 Feb 21 21:02 mytest/foo2/bar/baz I ran rsync with strace as follows: $ strace -f -ff -o /tmp/rsync-strace rsync -axv --temp-dir=/tmp --timeout=20 mytest /tmp/mytesttarget strace output shows that the directories are at first created with 700 permissions and the correct permissions are assigned later: (lots of output omitted) rsync-strace.5640:mkdir("mytest/foo1", 0700) = 0 rsync-strace.5640:mkdir("mytest/foo2", 0700) = 0 rsync-strace.5640:mkdir("mytest/foo3", 0700) = 0 rsync-strace.5640:chmod("mytest/foo1", 0755) = 0 rsync-strace.5640:chmod("mytest/foo2", 0755) = 0 rsync-strace.5640:chmod("mytest/foo3", 0755) = 0 Same sequence occurs with ordinary files. It seems likely that a timeout is triggered in the watchdog process while the directories are being created. Rsync is terminated and the directories end up with wrong permissions. In our use case it might take a long time to scan/create the large directory tree so the time window for this problem to appear is at least several minutes. Is this expected behavior or bug and is there any way to work around this? Best regards, - Matti Haavikko