cronning rsync

[matthew.2.burgess at bt.com]

Thanks for all your swift replies.  I can't believe that I didn't even see
the obvious solution of checking to see if rsync was running before-hand.
I've essentially rolled up my call to rsync in a shell-script as below:

---begin script---

#!/bin/sh

#is a previous rsync process still running?

ps -ef | grep 'rsync' | grep -v 'grep rsync' | grep -v 'rsync.sh' >
/dev/null

if [ $? -eq 1 ]; then #rsync isn't running - let's launch it now
 rsync [opts] user at host::/module/* .
else
  echo "Rsync is still running...please wait and try again later"
fi

---end script---

Thanks for all of your suggestions,

Matt Burgess

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-----Original Message-----
From: Adrian Ho [mailto:aho-sw-rsync at 03s.net]
Sent: Thursday, June 20, 2002 14:19
To: rsync at lists.samba.org
Subject: Re: cronning rsync


On Thu, Jun 20, 2002 at 12:51:14PM +0100, matthew.2.burgess at bt.com wrote:
> We're thinking about putting rsync to use in our production environment.
> What we want to do is have a cron job running on a client that replicates
> files on the host every five minutes.  We believe that some of the files
> will take longer than five minutes to complete.

Then you'll want to ensure that only one rsync instance is active
at a time.  This is best done with an external locking mechanism.
My personal favorite is setlock, part of Dan Bernstein's daemontools
package <http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html>, and your setlock'd cron job
might look like this:

0-55/5 * * * * setlock -n /tmp/.rsync.lock rsync <blah blah blah>

Your OS may have similar functionality already available, and other
3rd-party packages may also have rolled their own equivalents (I know
both procmail and maildrop did) -- "man -k lock" to see for yourself.

- Adrian

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