rsync - Nov 2005 - [Bug 3253] New: Feature request - Sync perms/ownership/time etc but with no file transfer

https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3253

           Summary: Feature request - Sync perms/ownership/time etc but with
                    no file transfer
           Product: rsync
           Version: 2.6.7
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P3
         Component: core
        AssignedTo: wayned@samba.org
        ReportedBy: travis@bigfiber.net
         QAContact: rsync-qa@samba.org


Feature Request: It would be very useful to be able to specify the normal
options such as --numeric-ids --owner --group --perms --recursive --existing etc
but with --no-transfer or something similar that would allow you to sync the
attributes of the files/dirs/etc but not actually transfer anything. (--existing
might be implied by --no-transfer, or perhaps not using --existing would
transfer missing files only)

Reasoning: It would allow for tasks like tightening security on identical
systems to be done with a lot more speed. You could go through and
painstaikingly adjust permissions on one server and then sync all the other
identical servers to match.
It would also be useful for cases where you back up an entire server nightly to
a backup server which allows access only to a normal user. You can then restore
it to a new server from the backup and sync to an existing server to fix the
permissions. With the current code I don't expect that it would be that
difficult to just skip the file transfer.
At the risk of adding bloat, rsync could even create an attributes file that
could be stored on the backup server and used to restore the permissions in the
event there is no remaining server to sync the perms from. This would allow
admins to back up to normal user accounts that can be subject to quota
restrictions.

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