rsync - Mar 2007 - --delete --force Won't Remove Directories With Dotnames

--delete --force Won't Remove Directories With Dotnames


rsync 2.6.9

Me, personally, I reckon this to be an irritant ... but perhaps (and having 
thought about this a bit I decided it's a good chance) this is an 
intentional and useful behaviour.  But it's a nuisance if you call 
your --partial-dir .partial, as I happen to do, since now if you remove a 
directory which was aborted in a recent transfer on source (leaving a 
.partial mirror at dest) the .partial directory won't go away on next 
rsync, ever.  You'd have to look for it, even when the rsync command is 
identical and the tree copied has the same name as before.  Rsync just sees 
right through .dirs, as if they weren't part of the source and therefore 
don't need deleting at dest (even if they clearly are under a directory 
which is).

Example: rsync --partial-dir=.partial /foo /bar.  Abort the transfer, and 
/foo/biguns/bigfile gets left in /bar/foo/biguns/.partial/bigfile.  Now 
remove /foo/biguns and do the transfer again, to completion.  The 
/bar/foo/biguns/.partial/bigfile is still there.

What do we think?

Cheers,
Sabahattin

-- 
Sabahattin Gucukoglu
<mail<at>sabahattin<dash>gucukoglu<dot>com>
Address harvesters, snag this: feedme@yamta.org
Phone: +44 20 88008915
Mobile: +44 7986 053399

On 3/2/07, Sabahattin Gucukoglu <mail@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com>
wrote:
> --delete --force Won't Remove Directories With Dotnames
>
> if you remove a
> directory which was aborted in a recent transfer on source (leaving a
> .partial mirror at dest) the .partial directory won't go away on next
> rsync, ever.
>
> Example: rsync --partial-dir=.partial /foo /bar.  Abort the transfer, and
> /foo/biguns/bigfile gets left in /bar/foo/biguns/.partial/bigfile.  Now
> remove /foo/biguns and do the transfer again, to completion.  The
> /bar/foo/biguns/.partial/bigfile is still there.
Rsync is leaving .partial around because it's a partial dir, not
because its name begins with a dot.  As the explanation of
--partial-dir in the man page says, to get rsync to delete old partial
dirs, supply your own rule --filter='R .partial/' and use
--delete-after to avoid deleting partial dirs until after rsync has
gotten what it needs from them.

Maybe rsync should automatically delete a directory's partial dir when
it finishes processing files immediately in that directory.

Matt