File merging

[Martin Pool]

On 13 Sep 2001, Britton <fsblk at aurora.uaf.edu> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 13 Sep 2001, Andy Goth wrote:
> 
> > Can rsync be made to merge files?  For instance, could I synchronize mboxes
> > between multiple computers, even though they're all changing?
> 
> Not if they are changing simultaneously.  You can't do that at all,
> without a distributed filesystem with locking.
> 
> On the other hand, if only one system changes at a time rsync works fine.

You can, however, use rsync in a scripting system to pull both the 
files to one machine, perform the merge in some content-specific 
way, and then stick them back on both machines.  As Britton 
observes, you may need some kind of locking or retry mechanism
here.

-- 
Martin