option --delete still not completely working (2.5.2)
Dave Dykstra
dwd at bell-labs.com
Tue Jan 29 06:11:13 EST 2002
On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 11:05:38AM -0600, Dave Dykstra wrote:
> I'm the one who put in that wording because I think I didn't completely
> understand what it did at the time. I just changed the wording to
>
> This option tells rsync to delete directories when
> non-directories (for example symlinks or plain files)
> take their place even if the deleted directories are
> not empty. This applies to both the --delete option
> and to cases where rsync tries to copy a normal file
> but the destination contains a directory of the same
> name.
>
> and I deleted the second paragraph about "very obscure cases".
Hold on, this is still wrong. The depth-first search does cause the
destination directories to be deleted, as in this test:
mkdir s d d/d
touch s/f d/d/f
rsync -a --delete s/ d/
The d/d directory does get replaced with d/f.
Here's what I wrote about this nearly 3 years ago:
On Thu, Feb 18, 1999 at 07:11:36AM +1100, dwd at samba.anu.edu.au wrote:
> I just wrote:
> > Tridge and I discovered recently that --force currently has no effect
> > because deletes are always done depth first.
>
> I take it back. As I was looking into changing the man page I discovered
> an obscure case where it does make a difference: when copying from a file
> when using -a (!) and the target is a non-empty directory. Reproduce with
> mkdir /tmp/bin /tmp/bin/wc
> touch /tmp/bin/wc/f
> rsync -av /bin/wc /tmp/bin
> rsync -av --force /bin/wc /tmp/bin
> Change any of the variables I mentioned and --force makes no difference.
>
> If anybody can give me a non-confusing way of explaining *that* in a man
> page I'd appreciate it :-( I think I'd rather turn it into a no-op and
> say that it is obsolete.
On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 10:02:42AM -0600, Phil Howard wrote:
...
> I'm still curious why --delete by itself didn't remove the members of
> the directory at the target, since those didn't exist at the source.
> It would have been helpful if the --delete documentation made a
> reference to --force.
Can you give a simple example to demonstrate that? I need to rewrite the
man page entry again.
- Dave Dykstra
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