return status and non-regular files?
Marc Sarrel
Marc.A.Sarrel at jpl.nasa.gov
Fri May 16 07:56:45 EST 2003
Recently, I ran rsync and got the following message:
skipping non-regular file "981005_plteph-de405s.bsp"
It turns out that the file in question is really a degenerate link
that points back to itself.
lrwxr-xr-x 1 18450 other 24 May 9 20:38
981005_plteph-de405s.bsp -> 981005_PLTEPH-DE405S.bsp
The confusing this is that although rsync printed what looks like an
error, it still returned a status of zero (i.e. success).
My question is: what should rsync do in such a case? The options I see are:
1) create the degenerate link on the remote machine (with or without
a warning) and return a status of zero.
2) don't create the degenerate link on the remote machine, print an
error message and return a status other than zero.
The degenerate link was simply a mistake on our part. But, the only
reason I caught it was that I happened to see the error message
buried in several hundred lines of verbose output. My script checks
the return status of rsync, but in this case, it indicated success
even though rsync didn't copy the degenerate link.
Also, it doesn't seem outrageous that someone, somewhere would intend
to create such a degenerate link. In that case, what should rsync
do? Considering this case, I would tend to favor option one above
even though that means I wouldn't have had any indication of an error.
Are there any other cases like this where rsync doesn't copy
something from the source to the destination, prints a warning but
still returns success?
For reference, my command line looks like this.
rsync --verbose --checksum --recursive --copy-unsafe-links --times
--rsh=ssh --rsync-path=/usr/local/bin/rsync --delete --timeout=30
--ignore-times --compress /source/directory
user at machine:/destination/directory
Marc
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