Can rsync update files in place?

[Donovan Baarda]

On Tue, Apr 16, 2002 at 09:43:12PM +0200, Paul Slootman wrote:
> On Tue 16 Apr 2002, Martin Pool wrote:
> > On 16 Apr 2002, Paul Slootman <paul+rsync at wurtel.net> wrote:
> > 
> > > Is there a way to get rsync to not create a new file while transferring
> > > and then rename it, but to instead update the existing file in place,
> > > i.e. simply write those blocks that have been updated and leave the rest
> > > alone?
> > 
> > That would be pretty hard, though not impossible.
> > 
> > I suspect it would be roughly as hard to put it into rsync as to 
> > write a new program from scratch, depending on what features you need.
> 
> That's what I've been thinking :-)

If someone wanted to experiment with this kind of thing, <plug> pysync would
be an ideal prototyping tool</plug>.

It's a Python implementation of rsync that I wrote for the express purpose
of being an easy way to demonstrate and experiment with the algorithm. It
includes both rsync and xdelta algorithms, and is about 500 lines in total,
but half of that is comments.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/pysync/

I am currently working on including a swig'ed wrapper for librsync, that
should mean you could use it for real-world (Python) applications. The plan
is to have this ready by the end of this week.

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