rsync feature suggestion

[Edward King]

Might it be possible to take the file list that you want to feed to 
rsync and turn it into an rsync.conf file?

A simple bash script could create the config file and call rsync (with 
the --config= to specify the temporary config file)

Something like this (syntax most likely is wrong, haven't tested it):


#!/bin/sh

IFS="
"
cat /etc/rsync.conf > rsync_command

FILES_TO_SYNC=`cat file_list.txt`

for EACH_FILE in $FILES_TO_SYNC; do
echo ' --include="${EACH_FILE}"' >> rsync_command
done

rsync --config=rsync_command


- Ed King

Hadmut Danisch wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I'd like to suggest a new feature to rsync.
>
>Problem:
>Currently, rsync generates a recursive list of file
>existing a the source directory, modifies this list by
>includes and excludes, and then copies these files.
>That's pretty good in most, but not all cases.
>
>I am mirroring a debian archive, but unfortunately, 
>debian mixes all files of several distributions in a 
>subtree /pool. There is no way to select only the files
>of a certain distribution through a simple exclude/include
>expression.
>
>There is a tool called debmirror, which first downloads 
>the distribution index files, extracts all the filenames/paths
>of the files needed and then calls rsync for every single file.
>Thats certainly not useful, especially since rsync shows the
>servers motd for every single file.
>
>Therefore, I'd like to suggest a new option: Allow rsync to 
>not build the list of files existing at the source directory 
>by recursively walking through the source directory, but by
>reading a file or stdin to get a list of files to be copied.
>
>This would allow to mirror the distribution index files in a 
>first step, then build the list of files needed and then to 
>download these files is a second step.
>
>An alternative method would be to keep the recursive method, but 
>to open a pipe to an external program. Before downloading a
>file, the path is printed to the pipe and an answer is read 
>from the pipe. Thus, an external filter program can decide for
>each single file whether to copy it or not.
>
>regards
>Hadmut 
>(Please respond directly, I'm not on your mailing list)
>
>
>  
>