petal - Info
Petal - a tool for maintaining permissions on trees of Unix files.
| Latest beta version: 0.81.0 beta, released 2004/04/16 |
Petal helps maintain the owner, group, and mode (typically set by the commands chown, chgrp, and chmod, respectively, or their equivalent system calls) by recalling this information from a central data store, i.e. a config file.
This is especially helpful in situations where system files are pulled from a version control system, or an application's configuration files are copied around with wild abandon. Petal helps you, the systems admin, avoid writing shell scripts with various and tedious chmod or chown calls in order to get that tree's permissions just right. This also means you don't have to worry about fat-fingering -- or even remembering -- to call chmod/chown on a set of files after you've copied them into place.
This website is somewhat sparse right now, but please feel free to check out Petal's FAQ/ReadMe document, or perhaps even download the latest version of the tool.