Feature Request

[Chuck Wolber]

Just built 2.6.1 and started testing it. Nice job guys. I especially love
the --progress and hardlink tweaks.

Quite often, while I have systems backing up out of cron, I'd love to be
able to see the --progress. Unfortunately, it's just not practical to
crank up the verbosity like that on a regular basis (some of these systems
have a few million files). A neat feature I'd like to see is the ability
to attach to a FIFO or something like that, that would (while the process
is running) allow me to get that information.

I'm sure that begs the question, why not just redirect to a file and parse
out what you want when the backup is done? First of all, that's sort of
ugly. What I have in mind is something a lot simpler. How about something
*ROUGHLY* analagous to this:


# cat /proc/$PID/prev
(4643, 13.2% of 1027477)

# cat /proc/$PID/curr
usr/local/rep/3ECBF9879808410/dictdb_3ECBFB89878410OX.db 

# cat /proc/$PID/curr_rate
80703888   8%   65.37kB/s    3:51:30


Or even better is just to update the environment, so a simple "cat
/proc/$PID/environ" could let you parse out $PREV, $CURR and $CURR_RATE
from the environment string.

I'm not much of a C coder, otherwise I'd offer up a patch. Wayne *DID* ask 
for neato features though, so this is my 2c worth.

-Chuck

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