--delete & --files-from can't be used as a purge list.
Alternate strategy suggestions?
Wayne Davison
wayned at samba.org
Fri Jan 14 19:55:59 GMT 2005
On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 04:02:39PM +0000, Simon wrote:
> Looking around it would appear --delete works upon directory updates,
> but there is nothing in the documentation that indicates that options
> in the example above cannot be used in this way.
I've updated the docs for the next release to make this clearer.
> Can anybody suggest alternative strategies to achieve a similar effect?
If you're tyring to run this rsync command to remove remote files:
rsync -av --files-from=files-to-delete / somehost:/dest/dir
this pipeline will actually do that job:
sed 's:^/::' files-to-delete | ssh somehost 'cd /dest/dir; xargs rm'
That lets you use a list of relative filenames that are read-in from a
file on the local system and delete them on the remote system. The sed
command may not be needed in your setup, but I include it because rsync
strips leading slashes from the files it reads via --files-from. You
may also wish to add the "-r" optionto "rm" if you want to remove dirs.
..wayne..
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