rsyncing fifos and sockets on FreeBSD

[Dominik Brettnacher]

Hi there,

there is a problem (which as far as i know) is already known with rsync on
FreeBSD: it is not possible to rsync neither fifos nor unix domain
sockets (note that you have to be root there):

# mkfifo test
# file test
test: fifo (named pipe)
# rsync -a test test2
mknod test2 : Invalid argument
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at main.c(620)
# file /var/run/log
/var/run/log: socket
# rsync -a /var/run/log test
mknod test : Invalid argument
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at main.c(620)


There exists a patch for this problem which was originally written vom
Andrew Flury in 2000 (see here:
http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/rsync/2000-December/003349.html).

Still, the recent versions of rsync (i.e. 2.5.6) have this behaviour. I
wonder why nobody applied this patch to a release of rsync, although it
works flawlessly. Any opinions on this?


-- 
Yours,

Dominik