If you are on a Linux system, and shutil.move a file
from anywhere onto a partition where you have write
permission but are not the owner, os.utime will fail
with an EPERM OSError. This can (and did) happen moving
a file on a vfat partition mounted with umask=0000, so
every user had read/write/execute but all files were
owned by root.

This happens in shutil.copystat, so shutil.move doesn't
remove the old file. The resulting error code (OSError,
EPERM) is not distinguishable from several other
permission errors that can happen during shutil.move,
even though a failure to set a utime is not fatal for
most move operations (mv(1) succeeds, for example).

I would suggest either ignoring an EPERM from copystat,
or catching it in shutil.copy2 and raising a more
specific exception so that it can be easily
distinguished from genuine failure due to permissions.

Logged In: YES 
user_id=796

The attached patch causes shutil.copy and shutil.copy2 (and
so copytree, and move) to ignore EACCES and EPERM from
copymode and copystat respectively. Other errors are
reraised with the original traceback. Any error copying the
file, rather than the metadata, is still considered fatal.
User calls to copymode and copystat still fail as before.

Justification: On Linux, utime(2) says the distinction
between EACCES and EPERM is blurry and "Linux is not careful
to distinguish between the EACCES and EPERM" so the patch
ignores both. In my opinion, anyone wanting to deal with
low-level details like mtimes and modes is probably not
using shutil, so ignoring is better than a new exception
(which would just result in complicated new code, and
surprise old code). It's also easy for a caller to check if
the mode/utimes were copied, if it's important to them.

See also http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1666318&group_id=5470&atid=105470 for a similar problem with copystat.

> In my opinion, anyone wanting to deal with low-level details like
> mtimes and modes is probably not using shutil

As a moderately experienced UNIX user, I would say that file permissions are not low-level details.  I see shutil functions as convenient wrappers to automate looping and calling a function, but I do care about file permissions.

If people are still interested in this modification, I think it would need a backward-compatible change, for example in the form of a new argument ignore_permission_errors, or a more generic onerror callback like rmtree has.