Fair enough.  But I definitely should have had permissions as I owned the process which brought the files down, and they were owner writable.  I'm now wondering if it's because I uploaded them via s3sync on a Windows box via cygwin where UIDs are different then where I downloaded them.  How do you store permission data?

I get this message for each file and directory I 'get'.  Is this a bug, and why are you trying to change the permissions anyway?

Running s3sync version 1.2.6 on Ubuntu 8.04, and:
$ ruby --version
ruby 1.8.6 (2007-09-24 patchlevel 111) [i486-linux]