Linux – making folders with mv

In order to share the subdirectories, I had to share the parent folder first with fsid=0. So on the server /etc/exports looks like this:

/var/shared 192.168.200.101(rw,fsid=0,sync)
/var/shared/folder1 192.168.200.101(rw,sync)
/var/shared/folder2 192.168.200.101(rw,sync)

then on the client /etc/fstab looks like:

192.168.200.201:/folder1 /home/nfsmnt/folder1 nfs4 rw 0 0
192.168.200.201:/folder2 /home/nfsmnt/folder2 nfs4 rw 0 0

I can then mount the folders as expected:

mount /home/nfsmnt/folder1

If cp creates the destination file, it replicates the permissions of the source file, except for the bits that are set in the umask. This is standard behavior (see e.g. step 3.b in the Single Unix v3 (POSIX 2001) specification.

Why was cp designed this way? Because there are many cases where this behavior is desirable, for example preserving a file's privacy when the original permissions are restrictive, and preserving executability is almost always the right thing to do. It is however unfortunate that not even GNU cp has an option to turn this behavior off.

Most copy tools (e.g. pax, rsync) behave in the same way. You can ensure the file will be created with the default permission by decoupling the source from the destination, for example with cat <baz >foo/baz.