rsync - Nov 2019 - hardlinking missing files from src to a dest: didn't work way I thought it would.

Have a directory with a bunch rpms in it, mostly x86_64.

Have another directory with a bunch, mostly 'noarch'.

Some of the noarch files are already in the x86_64 dir
and don't want to overwrite them.  They are on the same
physical disk, so really, just want the new 'noarch' files
hardlinked into the destination.

sitting in the noarch dir, I tried:
rsync -auv --ignore-existing  \
      --link-dest=/tumbleweed/. . /tumbleweed/.

I'm not "too" surprised since technically I asked for it
to synchronize them, then link them into the same dir,
but thought it would at least say something or create the
link, but neither happened.

I really didn't want to copy them -- I'd really prefer the link,
so how do I have it only create a hard link from
the source files to target DIR that don't already exist
in the target?

I know I can do it with a shell script, but I thought
rsync might be faster...then again, if I count figuring out
how to do it...not so sure....

How can I get rsync to do this?

Thanks...

On Thu 14 Nov 2019, L A Walsh via rsync wrote:
> Have a directory with a bunch rpms in it, mostly x86_64.
> 
> Have another directory with a bunch, mostly 'noarch'.
> 
> Some of the noarch files are already in the x86_64 dir
> and don't want to overwrite them.  They are on the same
> physical disk, so really, just want the new 'noarch' files
> hardlinked into the destination.
> 
> sitting in the noarch dir, I tried:
> rsync -auv --ignore-existing  \
>       --link-dest=/tumbleweed/. . /tumbleweed/.
This is not going to do anything useful, as you're telling it to look in
/tumbleweed/ for files that are to be placed in /tumbleweed/ i.e. the
exact same location. It's not going to do

    ln /tumbleweed/foo/bar /tumbleweed/foo/bar

which is effectively what you're telling it to do.

You need to specify the source directory as the link-dest directory.


Paul

Am 14.11.19 um 10:54 schrieb Paul Slootman via rsync:
> You need to specify the source directory as the link-dest directory.
Hi, I tried it also because it's an old question which has never worked
for me. Instead it creates copies and not hard links:


pierre at in94:~/tmp$ ls -li a b
a:
insgesamt 8
257315 -rw-r--r-- 1 pierre pierre 4 Nov 14 10:53 1
257316 -rw-r--r-- 1 pierre pierre 6 Nov 14 10:53 2

b:
insgesamt 0
pierre at in94:~/tmp$ rsync -av --link-dest=a a/ b/
sending incremental file list
--link-dest arg does not exist: a
./
1
2

sent 194 bytes  received 95 bytes  578.00 bytes/sec
total size is 10  speedup is 0.03
pierre at in94:~/tmp$ ls -li a b
a:
insgesamt 8
257315 -rw-r--r-- 1 pierre pierre 4 Nov 14 10:53 1
257316 -rw-r--r-- 1 pierre pierre 6 Nov 14 10:53 2

b:
insgesamt 8
257312 -rw-r--r-- 1 pierre pierre 4 Nov 14 10:53 1
257313 -rw-r--r-- 1 pierre pierre 6 Nov 14 10:53 2


Any idea why it's not working?


Using cp -l is working well:

pierre at in94:~/tmp$ ls -li a b
a:
insgesamt 8
257315 -rw-r--r-- 1 pierre pierre 4 Nov 14 10:53 1
257316 -rw-r--r-- 1 pierre pierre 6 Nov 14 10:53 2

b:
insgesamt 0
pierre at in94:~/tmp$ cp -l a/* b/.
pierre at in94:~/tmp$ ls -li a b
a:
insgesamt 8
257315 -rw-r--r-- 2 pierre pierre 4 Nov 14 10:53 1
257316 -rw-r--r-- 2 pierre pierre 6 Nov 14 10:53 2

b:
insgesamt 8
257315 -rw-r--r-- 2 pierre pierre 4 Nov 14 10:53 1
257316 -rw-r--r-- 2 pierre pierre 6 Nov 14 10:53 2

Cheers,
Pierre