local host: /dir/dira /dir/dirb /dir/dirb/file2
remote host: /dir/dira /dir/dira/file1 /dir/dirb /dir/dirb/file2
If we do [CASE 1]
rsync -rR -v --delete /dir/dira /dir/dirb remote:/
we have it right
building file list ... done deleting dir/dira/file1 /dir/dirb/file2 wrote 664 bytes read 846 bytes 232.31 bytes/sec total size is 537585 speedup is 1.21
But if we do the same with files explicitly listed [CASE2]
rsync -rR -v --delete /dir/dira/file1 /dir/dirb/file2 remote:/
we have an error
building file list ... link_stat /tmp/dira/file1 : No such file or directory done IO error encountered - skipping file deletion /tmp/dirb/file2 wrote 652 bytes read 846 bytes 230.46 bytes/sec total size is 94186 speedup is 62.87 rsync error: partial transfer (code 23) at main.c(578)
It's an rsync version 2.5.5
I can see the difference but at the same time I do not see a reason why --delete option should not work if files are explicitly listed. If not --delete, then maybe some of its variants, like --delete-args. Here is a real-life example, which creates a great headache for us.
In our production environment we heavily rely on rsync. We are required to synchronize a working host with disaster recovery host (dr) every 15 minutes or so. 'synchronize' means that a large number of scattered state/log/config files has to be copied to dr host. An overall size of all files is pretty high. Given the required frequency of updates rsync is an obvious choice. But we are out of luck with it! It is important to understand that the files are scattered over the filesytem. There is no chance to sync it dir-by-dir. File list is cosntructed from different sources: predefined chunks, outputs from 'find' with wildcards, and so on. When the list is ready, we would like to sync it with something like this
rsync -aR --delete ${list} dr:/I would expect that in this context rsync will "synchronize" non-existing files from the list by deleting them on dr system. But it does not do so. Moreover, rsync fails with an error code, which we are unable to suppress. It's not an error at all in our case!
Well, this posting is actually a question to rsync authors. If you have a good reason not to expand --delete functionality to explicitly listed files, then maybe you have in mind some workaround for situations like ours?
Thanks,
Igor
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