Issue 1559684: shutil.copyfile incomplete on NTFS (original) (raw)

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copyfile indeed fails to copy a lot of attributes of the file, e.g. the file owner and group are not copied, and neither are the ACLs. Unfortunately, it is not possible to implement a full copy; shutil.copyfile has always only copied the file contents. To implement a full copy, more Win32 would need to be exposed. Use the CopyFile function from the Win32 extensions for a full copy.

Reclassifying this as a documentation bug: the documentation should mention that this only copies the direct file contents.