remove-sent-files

[Wayne Davison]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 10:41:06PM +0000, rsync at hot.ping.de wrote:
> wouldn't it be much more comfortable if rsync would delete every sent
> file just after completing the single file transfer?

Having the --remove-sent-files option make the sender remove files as
soon as it has sent the file would be very dangerous because the sender
won't know if the file got successfully transfered or not (which means
that if the connection fails, one or more files might be lost).  The
receiving side sends out a "success" message as soon as it can, but it
might take a while to get back to the receiver, especially if there is a
lot of generator data in the way (which is the case if you're updating
files).

If you have the receiving side processing and remove the arrived files,
you can avoid duplicates by keeping a database of name+size+mtime
triplets around, and expiring old entries fairly rapidly.

..wayne..