Fileutils and preserve

With ruby 1.8 I was glad to see fileutils, as ftools had some annoying behaviors (such as ignoring umask with File.mkpath).

I have not been able to figure out how to get the default behavior of
'cp -R' under UNIX however. Acc. to the man page:

--preserve[=ATTR_LIST]
               preserve the specified attributes (default: mode,owner-ship,timestamps)

In UNIX, if ownership can't be maintained, the call still completes
successfully, keeping timestamps and mode.

With fileutils.rb:
/opt/ictools/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/ftools.rb:156:in `o_chmod': Operation not permitted - /net/hammer/mnt/a/hcb/cicd/test-data/eco/testsuite/agl013/release/codex/brettw/tests/eco/. (Errno::EPERM)

So I tried out FileUtils.install. It has the needed mode option defaulting to the src. However, it does not have directory recursing.

Is there a way to do this? Or am I still going to have to either write wrappers or call out to the system? Hopefully I just missed something.

Thanks!

Brett Williams