[Slackbuilds-users] broken symlink or owner

[Jim]

On Sat, Jun  6, 2026 at 21:51 (+0700), Willy Sudiarto Raharjo wrote:

> Hello everyone

> we have just noticed a few things after observing this week's public update
> (the issue has persisted for a long time ago, but we never noticed it) that
> some scripts, despite passed the CI test, resulted in some broken symlinks or
> owners

> We urge maintainers to review their own scripts for following things:
> 1. If you want to copy certain file from your SlackBuild directory ($CWD),
> please use cat instead of cp. Please see this example:
> https://git.slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/commit/?id=2f3b425e3

?

The link points to an example where CHANGES and TODO are still copied with
"cp".  Is that example only considered to be partially fixed, or is this
"use cat" advice only for certain peculiar files?

I'm sort of curious... a lot of SlackBuilds have
        chown -R root:root .
Would it be OK to instead just either do another recursive chown afterwards
if there are no non-root owner/group permissions, or maybe change
        cp -a
to
        cp -a --no-preserve=ownership

In those cases where a lot of files are copied, using the above cp seems
more expeditious than using a bunch of cat commands (or writing a loop).


Thanks.
                                Jim