rsync -rcv printing out filenames when content identical

Mikolaj Kucharski mikolaj at kucharski.name
Sat Jan 22 11:21:13 MST 2011


Hi,

I'm heavly relying on rsync -nvrc during my day-to-day work in UNIX-like
enviroment. I'm using rsync for few years now and today I've found a
situation which I do not understand.

I have two directories with few maildirs in it. Each maildir containg
some emails. I'm testing scripts which I wrote to manipulate those
emails.

Each time I want to revert changes in one set of maildirs I've rsync'ing
them from backup copy:

$ rsync -rcv --delete backup/ mail/

Nothing special about that. However my scripts are modyfing only
mail/INBOX maildir, nothing else. To my surprize when I ran rsync
command to revert my changes here is what I got (I will use -n in below
examples for now):

$ rsync -v -n -rc --delete backup/ mail/
sending incremental file list
deleting INBOX/new/1247266872_0.9989.myhost,U=759,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e
deleting INBOX/new/1247249243_0.9989.myhost,U=758,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e
deleting INBOX/new/1247085243_0.9989.myhost,U=685,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e
deleting INBOX/new/1247083982_0.9989.myhost,U=684,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e
deleting INBOX/new/1247070709_0.9989.myhost,U=655,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e
deleting INBOX/new/1246460627_0.9989.myhost,U=472,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e
deleting INBOX/new/1246372564_0.20677.myhost,U=407,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e
deleting INBOX/new/1246370187_1.20677.myhost,U=40,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e
deleting INBOX/new/1246370187_0.20677.myhost,U=39,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e
INBOX/new/1246370187_0.20677.myhost,U=39,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e:2,
INBOX/new/1246370187_1.20677.myhost,U=40,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e:2,
INBOX/new/1246372564_0.20677.myhost,U=407,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e:2,
INBOX/new/1246460627_0.9989.myhost,U=472,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e:2,
INBOX/new/1247070709_0.9989.myhost,U=655,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e:2,
INBOX/new/1247083982_0.9989.myhost,U=684,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e:2,
INBOX/new/1247085243_0.9989.myhost,U=685,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e:2,
INBOX/new/1247249243_0.9989.myhost,U=758,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e:2,
INBOX/new/1247266872_0.9989.myhost,U=759,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e:2,
Jira/cur/1246370207_0.20677.myhost,U=1,FMD5=89f846f264788bfaf58c4efbf05de4eb:2,S
Jira/cur/1246370208_0.20677.myhost,U=2,FMD5=89f846f264788bfaf58c4efbf05de4eb:2,S
Jira/cur/1246370208_1.20677.myhost,U=3,FMD5=89f846f264788bfaf58c4efbf05de4eb:2,S
Jira/cur/1246370208_2.20677.myhost,U=4,FMD5=89f846f264788bfaf58c4efbf05de4eb:2,S
Jira/cur/1246370208_3.20677.myhost,U=5,FMD5=89f846f264788bfaf58c4efbf05de4eb:2,S
Jira/cur/1246370209_0.20677.myhost,U=6,FMD5=89f846f264788bfaf58c4efbf05de4eb:2,S
Jira/cur/1246370209_1.20677.myhost,U=7,FMD5=89f846f264788bfaf58c4efbf05de4eb:2,S
Jira/cur/1246370209_2.20677.myhost,U=8,FMD5=89f846f264788bfaf58c4efbf05de4eb:2,S
Jira/cur/1246370212_3.20677.myhost,U=19,FMD5=89f846f264788bfaf58c4efbf05de4eb:2,S
Jira/cur/1246370213_0.20677.myhost,U=20,FMD5=89f846f264788bfaf58c4efbf05de4eb:2,S
Jira/cur/1246370213_1.20677.myhost,U=21,FMD5=89f846f264788bfaf58c4efbf05de4eb:2,S
Jira/cur/1246370213_2.20677.myhost,U=22,FMD5=89f846f264788bfaf58c4efbf05de4eb:2,S
Jira/cur/1246370213_3.20677.myhost,U=23,FMD5=89f846f264788bfaf58c4efbf05de4eb:2,S
Jira/cur/1246370214_0.20677.myhost,U=24,FMD5=89f846f264788bfaf58c4efbf05de4eb:2,S
Jira/cur/1246370214_1.20677.myhost,U=25,FMD5=89f846f264788bfaf58c4efbf05de4eb:2,S
...

so even when I'm modyfing INBOX rsync shows that it's syncing files from
Jira as well. Now if I run above command (rsync -v -n -rc --delete
backup/ mail/) again and again and again, I will randomly get sometimes
sync of INBOX only or sometimes INBOX and Jira. Ofcourse INBOX sync is
correct, as files where moved around, buy why Jira? Nothing changed
there.

If I run diff -ruN backup/Jira mail/Jira there are no differences
reported. If I cmp(1) all files from both Jira folders there are no
differences.

How is it possible that rsync(1) sometimes reports (via -v option) that
some files from Jira were synced and sometimes it doesn't?

If I rsync -v -n -rc --delete backup/Jira mail/Jira I never have report
that something was copied.

If someone could shed some light on this for me I would really
appreciate it.

Cheers.


I can reproduce that on RHEL6beta1 rsync-3.0.6-4.el6.x86_64, OpenBSD
4.9-beta rsync-3.0.7, OpenBSD 4.6 rsync-3.0.6

-- 
best regards
q#


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