Questions with rsync

Gordon Messmer yinyang at eburg.com
Thu Jun 4 02:02:58 UTC 2009


On 06/03/2009 06:05 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-06-03 at 10:05 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>> On Wed, 2009-06-03 at 03:02 -0700, GMS S wrote:
>>> Will this command do the job for backup?
>>>
>>> rsync -vpa / /home/user/backup
>> Er, isn't this recursive?
>
> What I meant to say was "isn't this an infinite loop?" The entire
> filesystem rooted at / is being copied into one of its subtrees.
>
> The answer is that rsync is clever enough to avoid this (I tried it on a
> test directory),

Try it a second time.

rsync ain't that smart.  The only reason it worked the first time is 
that rsync built a list of files/directories to copy before it copied 
them.  With rsync 3, it only builds that list for one directory at a 
time.  Older versions built the entire list before beginning.  You'll 
get different results with the two versions, IIRC.




More information about the fedora-list mailing list