pruning old files

[jw schultz]

On Tue, Oct 22, 2002 at 08:34:42AM +0200, Michael Salmon wrote:
> On Tuesday, October 22, 2002 09:46:36 AM +0900 Shinichi Maruyama 
> <marya at st.jip.co.jp> wrote:
> +------
> |
> | jw> In the past i found that using find was quite good for this.
> | jw> Use touch to create a file with a mod_time just before you
> | jw> started the last sync.  Then from inside $src run
> | jw> 	find .  -newer $touchfile -print|cpio -pdm $dest
> |
> | For pruning, how about to add the feature to rsync.
> | Is it difficult ?
> |
> | 	--exclude-older=SECONDs
> | 		exclude files older than SECONDs before
> | 	--ignore-older=SECONDs
> | 		ignore any operations with the files older than
> | 		SECONDs before
> | 		differ from --exclude-olders, these files are not
> | 		affected from --include files or --delete-excluded
> +-----X8
> 
> Wouldn't a better solution be to add a file list option, similar to cpio, 
> to rsync? That would also satisfy those who want complex include and 
> exclude rules. Probably 2 options are required, one for newline terminated 
> names and the other for null terminated names.

A file list option would help for some things.  Not for this
particular case.  The filelist is too big for rsync to
handle but cpio doesn't have the memory footprint problems.
In this particular case the rsync algorythm doesn't buy him
anything, in fact it actually hurts performance because both
source and destination are mounted via NFS.  The only
advantage rsync would in this situation of local sync of nfs
mounts is that it will recognize and propogate file
deletion.


-- 
________________________________________________________________
	J.W. Schultz            Pegasystems Technologies
	email address:		jw at pegasys.ws

		Remember Cernan and Schmitt