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.
