rsync - May 2006 - New option: --progress-newline

In trying to write a nice GUI for rsync, it was difficult to read
rsync's stdout
when using --progress, as --progress uses \r to make things pretty on
a terminal,
but it's painful to read into another process.

The attached patch made it much easier for me to read and parse the output from
--progress by adding a command-line option --progress-newline, which simply
causes --progress to use \n instead of \r for eol to ease reading stdout.

I hope this is useful.
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On Thu 11 May 2006, Ryan T. Sammartino wrote:
> In trying to write a nice GUI for rsync, it was difficult to read
> rsync's stdout
> when using --progress, as --progress uses \r to make things pretty on
> a terminal,
> but it's painful to read into another process.
Well... shouldn't be that much of a problem? Putting this tr command in
the pipe should help:

    tr '\r' '\n'

> The attached patch made it much easier for me to read and parse the output 
> from
> --progress by adding a command-line option --progress-newline, which simply
> causes --progress to use \n instead of \r for eol to ease reading stdout.
A bigger issue may be that output is buffered when writing into a pipe,
which means you only get rsync's output when the buffer is full. This is
referred to in (long-standing) Debian bug #48108 (see
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=48108).


Paul Slootman

> Well... shouldn't be that much of a problem? Putting this tr command in
> the pipe should help:
>    tr '\r' '\n'
You assume I am working in a sane environment. :)
> A bigger issue may be that output is buffered when writing into a pipe,
> which means you only get rsync's output when the buffer is full.
Yes, that is exactly this issue (sorry, my original message wasn't
very clear, which is what I get for sending e-mail at 2:30 AM).

Nothing appears in stdout until either a very long time has passed or
the file has completed, which is fairly useless when trying to make a
pretty progress bar for the command-line challenged.
> This is referred to in (long-standing) Debian bug #48108 (see
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=48108).
Hmm.  Now why didn't Google turn that up for me?

Anyways, that's a nicer way of doing it, it seems... again, coding at
2:30 AM is not advised.

I'd vote for that patch (or something like it that also includes
updating the man page, etc) to be included (not that my vote counts
for anything).


Cheers.