Quoting "Jeremy C. Reed" <reed@reedmedia.net>:

> Also, have a look at my
> http://www.reedmedia.net/misc/netbsd/update_etc/
> and J. McNeill's http://invisible.yi.org/~jmcneill/netbsd/merge

OK

> > "-rwxr-xr-x" strings to produce octal number. But can it be avoided?
> 
> I am curious, what do you need this for?

I want to make sure the permissions are same as in the newly created 
temporary file. After writing this I discovered "cp -p" as the man page
says this is just what I want. Added directories are remembered and the user
is asked to perform mtree to set the owner and permissions.

If the script is good enough (after comments and improvements), where should
it go, should I add it into pkgsrc/sysutils? And what name should we
use? My current working name is "etcupdate".
Martti