Failure to update differing file

Michael Fischer fischer-michael at cs.yale.edu
Sat May 4 22:01:02 EST 2002


>On Sat, 4 May 2002, Michael Fischer wrote:
>> 1.  If I touched only the corrupted file, so the file times differed,
>>       then rsync did update the destination file.
>> 
>> 2.  If I used the --checksum flag, then it updated correctly.
>> 
>> But just a plain rsync failed to notice that the files were different.

On Sat, 4 May 2002, Wayne Davidson wrote:
> Then it sounds like rsync was behaving exactly as it should.  By default
> it just compares the file times and size and omits anything that appears
> to be up-to-date by that standard.  The --checksum option tells it to go
> a step farther and check if the checksums match before deciding if the
> files are really the same (which is extremely slow and not usually
> needed, so it's not on by default).  

Thanks for pointing this out.  On re-reading the man page, I just came
across the -I (--ignore-times) option, which both explains rsync's
normal behavior in this case and how to circumvent it.

--Mike




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