rsync - Apr 2005 - Feature Request: listing files from local dirs

Hi,

rsync does not list files if used locally without a destination but it
does when used remote archives, this is not orthognonal. Scripts have to
handle this special case.

There might be some intention to show the help message to give the user
a hint that he forgot the destionation. Thats fine, but at least with
--list-only rsync should produce a listing (and nothing else, so that
it can be parsed by scripts).

My current workaround is to rsync -n against an empty dir and filter out
any other noise lines from the list (traffic stats/messages about files
which are not handled). Would be nice if the noise lines go to stderr
instead stdout (or even omited when using --list-only).

How about a --list-only0 which sends '\0' terminated lines?

	Regards Christian Th?ter

PS: please CC to me, I am not subscribed to the list

On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 11:17:07AM +0200, chth@gmx.net
wrote:
> rsync does not list files if used locally without a destination but it
> does when used remote archives, this is not orthognonal.
Correct.  This is the historical way rsync has worked, and I haven't
changed it -- at least, not yet.  I did make it possible to list files
from a local transfer, but you need to still include a destination along
with the --list-only option.  I like your idea of having rsync not fail
if the destination directory is missing when --list-only was specified.
> My current workaround is to rsync -n against an empty dir and filter
> out any other noise lines from the list
When parsing the output of rsync, it is always better to use the
--log-format option with a prefix (something like %i or %t) to make
parsing the output more accurate than parsing the verbose messages.
> Would be nice if the noise lines go to stderr instead stdout (or even
> omited when using --list-only).
I think the --list-only lines are unique enough that they can be
reliably differentiated from the rest of the output by a script.
> How about a --list-only0 which sends '\0' terminated lines?
The CVS version of rsync outputs non-printable parts of a filename using
octal (e.g. \012) escapes plus "\\" for backslash, so your script can
get the full name of each file without needing them to be '\0' separated
(it would just need to first change "\NNN" sequences back into a
single
char, and then change any "\\" sequences into a single backslash).

..wayne..