On Fri, 2007-12-28 at 13:03 -0500, Douglas Wade Needham wrote: > The command line used is one like the following, while chroot'ed into > the sandbox, with the attached filter: > > rsync -OavzHn --filter="merge /.rsync/filter.dirs" --ignore-existing / > viking:/ > > I have also confirmed it on the latest versions found in FC6 and > CentOS 4.5, and 5.0. In this case, I have copied things from under / > into a directory such as /sandbox/rsync_test, added a /.rsync > subdirectory to hold my test_rsync script and filter file, and after > adding a few extra files and creating a /opt2 by renaming /opt, > running rsync. In each and every case, I find that /.rsync and /opt2 > are transferred even if listed in a protect rule. And this is true > regardless of whether or not the path specification start and/or ends > in a slash.
Right. As documented in the man page, the sole effect of a protect rule is to stop a destination file (or directory) from being deleted if it is extraneous. To stop a destination file from being updated, use an exclude rule. > Now, as to why the protect rule vs. exclude rule is important, I want > to use the filter.dirs file to protect areas which are not a part of > the OS, such as application data, home directories and such with this > file, If you mean that you don't want these areas processed at all, use an exclude rule. > and then have another file protect things such as configuration > files which are a part of the OS, and should not be pushed once they > exist, but should be pushed to a server once the server is up and > running with a minimal OS load. The --ignore-existing option makes rsync leave existing files alone throughout the destination. Rsync does not provide a way to selectively activate this behavior for some areas of the destination. If you want this behavior for certain areas, you can use two rsync runs: one with --ignore-existing for those areas, and one without --ignore-existing with those areas excluded. Still, note that --ignore-existing operates at the level of individual files; there is no way to tell rsync not to add new files to an existing directory. If you need that, then for the first run, instead of passing --ignore-existing, you should run a list of the "configuration" areas through a script on the destination machine that filters out those that already exist and then pass the resulting list to rsync with --files-from. > (Now if only rsync offered a way to run commands on the remote server > when certain files were updated...hehe). You can accomplish this by using an rsync daemon on the destination with a "post-xfer exec" script that parses the daemon's log for any relevant updates and runs any appropriate commands. Or you could use a system administration tool such as Puppet ( https://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet ) to run commands on a file update whether the update was done via rsync or other means. Matt -- To unsubscribe or change options: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
