what's with that trailing "." for the mode from "ls -l"

[Bryn M. Reeves]

On Thu, 2009-11-12 at 08:58 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>   that's ok, it was only an issue because of the incredibly hacky way
> that a numeric mode was being reproduced from an existing file -- by
> grabbing the current symbolic mode, then running it through sed to get
> the numeric mode back.  yuck.
> 
>   as someone noted here earlier, using "stat" is way simpler.

If you just need to propagate permissions from one path name to another
you can use chmod directly:

chmod --reference=/path/to/source /path/to/dest

Regards,
Bryn.