Bug report: rsync does not always discriminate upper and lower case

alain content acontent at ulb.ac.be
Sat Dec 27 22:28:06 EST 2003


Hi, 
I found this surprising behavior with rsync  (version 2.5.7  protocol
version 26) on Mac OS X (Panther, 10.3.2) :

Suppose you  have a folder "Source" containing a file named "abc", and its
backup as folder "Clone", created by rsync :

rsync -a ~/Desktop/Source/ ~/Desktop/Clone


Now change the name of file "abc" into "ABC" and re-sync :

rsync -av ~/Desktop/Source/ ~/Desktop/Clone

>building file list ... done
>wrote 141 bytes  read 20 bytes  107.33 bytes/sec
>total size is 6148  speedup is 38.19

Not good : the change has not been done !
And suppose you do this:
rsync -av --delete-after ~/Desktop/Source/ ~/Desktop/Clone
>building file list ... done
>deleting a file named abc
>wrote 145 bytes  read 20 bytes  330.00 bytes/sec
>total size is 6148  speedup is 37.26

Much worse, the file is not preserved in the backup.
There is a workaround though :

rsync -av --delete ~/Desktop/Source/ ~/Desktop/Clone
>building file list ... done
>deleting a file named abc
>./
>a file named ABC
>wrote 181 bytes  read 36 bytes  434.00 bytes/sec
>total size is 6148  speedup is 28.33

However, the behavior is inconsistent and can result in incomplete copies or
backups.

Alain Content, Brussels




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