Preserve permissions and ownership when copying files using cp

We use the -p flag to tell cp to preserve the permissions and ownership of the files involved. So if we wanted to copy a folder recursively preserving permissions and ownership of the folder and the files contained in it, we would use the following command (preferably as root):

cp -R -p /source/folder/ /destination/folder/

All the files in the source folder would be copied to the destination folder and the permissions and owners would be preserved.

If we had a single file it would be similar:

cp -p /path/to/file-a /path/to/file-b

To check that the owner and permissions have been preserved, we can simply use:

ls -altp /destination/folder/

The result of the above command would show us the permissions that the files in the destination folder have.