rsync - Mar 2007 - copy file upon --delete possible?

Hi all, I have a particular request:
I was asked whether when --delete is specified on the client, the daemon 
can, instead of delete the file, move it to a "trash" directory.
The path of the latter may be hardcoded and it is not important to 
retain info about original path etc..

Not sure whether --backup or some similar option can do this just for 
deleted files... I was looking through the source to see if this can be 
hard-coded, and it seems that the function "delete_item" is where it 
should be done.. specifically in "do_unlink", where one could
hard-code
a "copy_file" to a fixed trash directory before unlink...
Any suggestions??

Cheers
Julian

On Wed 28 Mar 2007, Julian wrote:
> Hi all, I have a particular request:
> I was asked whether when --delete is specified on the client, the daemon 
> can, instead of delete the file, move it to a "trash" directory.
> The path of the latter may be hardcoded and it is not important to 
> retain info about original path etc..
> 
> Not sure whether --backup or some similar option can do this just for 
> deleted files... I was looking through the source to see if this can be 
A simple test (much easier than looking at the source :-) :

$ cd /tmp
$ mkdir x y
$ rm -rf z
$ date > y/foo
$ rsync -av --delete --backup --backup-dir=../z x/ y
building file list ... done
deleting foo
./

sent 77 bytes  received 26 bytes  206.00 bytes/sec
total size is 0  speedup is 0.00
$ ls -l y
total 0
$ ls -l z
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 paul staff 30 Mar 28 17:00 foo


So, yes, it's possible.


Paul Slootman

On Wed, Mar 28, 2007 at 03:51:26PM +0200, Julian wrote:
> I was asked whether when --delete is specified on the client, the
> daemon can, instead of delete the file, move it to a "trash"
> directory.
That's what the --backup option will do when a --backup-dir is
specified.  However, it also copies all changed files into the
backup hierarchy as well.  There is a diff in the patches dir
named backup-dir-dels.diff that allows you to separate deletions
from updated files.

..wayne..