Wierd problem with rysnc.

[Dave Dykstra]

I am unaware of anybody else reporting a similar problem.  My guess is that
your experimentation with different rsync exclude options is actually the
cause of the problem; they can be very tricky to understand.  Give us the
complete command line you're using and describe in detail exactly what
is happening, including file names.  If you can narrow it down to a simple
example that somebody else could follow to reproduce the problem, that
would be the best.

- Dave Dykstra

On Wed, Jan 23, 2002 at 10:52:21AM -0800, Sri Ramkrishna wrote:
> I'm responding to my own mail.  I'm adding some extra detail.  Yesterday,
> we added another symlink that points to the same file as the symlink that
> was being deleted.  The symlink was put into the excluded file and when
> the test was run, the sample symlink was intact but the original symlink was
> removed and still nothing in the logs saying it had removed the file.
> 
> When we removed the symlink and replaced it with a file then the file 
> was untouched while the symlink was deleted.
> 
> sri
> 
> On Tue, Jan 22, 2002 at 10:29:10PM -0800, Sri Ramkrishna wrote:
> > 
> > Hi folks, I'm having a problem with my rsync between two areas between a WAN.
> > The problem is really odd.  I have a script that runs every night.  Lately,
> > we've been having problems with rsync.  The source side is an ordinary file
> > while the destination side is a symlink.  We've been having problems with rsync
> > deleting the symlink and repacing it with the source copy despite having it in
> > the exception list.
> > 
> > The problem only occurs sporadically, it might not happen one day but happen at
> > another.  I ruled out some other process deleting it by running the script at a
> > certain time after putting the symlink back.  I had tried putting exceptions
> > for the whole directory and that didn't help either.  I also ran it with a
> > couple of verbose options and the log of that didn't show it had deleted
> > anything ever though after the script ran the symlink disappeared.
> > 
> > So, I'm looking for a litle advice on how to proceed?  Thanks!
> > 
> > sri