rsync - Jul 2004 - Trouble with "--delete" with "--files-from"

Hi all,

  I've scoured the web, faq and mailing list archives to try and find an 
answer to this problem I'm having, but to no avail....

I'm trying to rsync a Cyrus IMAP message store "structure" from
one system
to another. (I say "structure" because I don't want to copy over
the actual
messages in the message store.) For those of you unfamiliar with the 
structure of Cyrus message stores, they are basically hierarchical with 
each mailbox being a directory ("sub-mailboxes" being sub-directories
etc.)
and each message being a file. In addition, each mailbox has a number of 
control files.

I can derive the list of files and directories I want to rsync from the 
Cyrus "mailboxes" file and this seems to me to be the most efficient
way of
tackling this.

So, having got my list of files, I then rsync using a command of the form...

rsync -q -u -W -a -e /usr/local/bin/ssh --delete --files-from=tmp
/temp2 /mnt2/sms/mail user@remote:/var/cyrus/backups/spo-ms

This is working well for me, except for the "--delete" bit. (When
mailboxes
are deleted on the source system I obviously want this reflected on the 
target.) Try as I might, I can't seem to get this to work.

Here's an extract from my --files-from file...

/c/user/ccxxx/cyrus.seen
/c/user/ccxxx/cyrus.cache
/c/user/ccxxx/cyrus.index
/c/user/ccxxx/cyrus.header
/c/user/ccxxx/Bris-Lists/cyrus.seen
/c/user/ccxxx/Bris-Lists/cyrus.cache
/c/user/ccxxx/Bris-Lists/cyrus.index
/c/user/ccxxx/Bris-Lists/cyrus.header
/c/user/ccxxx/Bris-Lists/bris-cuc/cyrus.seen
/c/user/ccxxx/Bris-Lists/bris-cuc/cyrus.cache
/c/user/ccxxx/Bris-Lists/bris-cuc/cyrus.index
/c/user/ccxxx/Bris-Lists/bris-cuc/cyrus.header

...in case that's useful.

Does anyone know where I'm going wrong here?

Cheers,

Richard Hopkins,
Information Services,
Computer Centre,
University of Bristol,
Bristol, BS8 1UD, UK

Tel +44 117 928 7859
Fax +44 117 929 1576

On Thu, Jul 29, 2004 at 03:09:06PM +0100, Richard Hopkins
wrote:
> This is working well for me, except for the "--delete" bit. (When
mailboxes
> are deleted on the source system I obviously want this reflected on the 
> target.)
Delete only affects directories that rsync has sent the contents of,
otherwise it wouldn't know what to delete.  It sounds like you should be
using --exclude instead of --files-from, like the following (I made a
guess that the /temp2 arg from your original command was a typo since it
isn't leagal syntax to have two sources with --files-from).

Put this in a file named "ex":
+ cyrus.seen
+ cyrus.cache
+ cyrus.index
+ */
- *

... and run this:

rsync -quWae /usr/local/bin/ssh --delete --exclude-from=ex
     /mnt2/sms/mail/ user@remote:/var/cyrus/backups/spo-ms

I think the trailing slash is what you want on the source -- only
remove it if you want the "mail" subdir to be included in
"spo-ms".

..wayne..