Artem Chuprina wrote: > As you appeal to GNU cp, see > its default behavior: BY DEFAULT it TRIES to save permissions and > owner/group No, by default GNU cp does not try to copy either owner/group or permissions to an existing destination. It does not invoke chmod or chown unless you use something like 'cp -p'. > I can create files there, but I cannot change > their metainfo, because they are not mine. This is an unusual setup, at least for me. If I create a file, I should be able to change its metainformation. I expect this setup will cause problems with other applications, not just Emacs. GNU tar would be one example. That being said, we should be able to work around the problem by having copy-file behave more like 'cp'. That is, copy-file should not invoke chmod by default; it should invoke chmod only if it's told to preserve permissions (or preserve ownership, since that often involves temporarily revoking permissions for security reasons). That way, plain copy-file should work with your setup, although you'll still have trouble with copy-file with the last arg t (which asks to copy permissions). Attached is a proposed patch to do that, against trunk bzr 115721. Does it solve your problem?