Transforming file names & contents

[Rick Mann]

Hi. I work at an online content provider. We have magazine articles in 
thousands of files stored on our servers. Files are added to the 
repository on a regular basis. I use rsync extensively (thank you to 
the authors) to periodically copy newly added files to my local copy of 
the repository for development purposes. rsync wonderfully reduces the 
amount of file transfer necessary.

The size of the repository has grown dramatically, which is fine on the 
servers but putting a strain on my system (a PowerBook). So I added 
support to our app for compressed versions of the files.

However, now all the files locally are suffixed with ".gz", whereas all 
the files on the server are not. I would like to continue to use rsync, 
but tell it that a file locally ending in ".gz" matches a file of the 
same name on the server without. It can't use checksums, obviously, 
because the targets are compressed.

Is there any way to do this in rsync? If not, may I request it as a 
feature? I'd be happy to implement it myself, but there's just no time 
to familiarize myself with the code and do it.

Related to that, it would be cool to tell rsync to run the files 
through gzip (or any other program) as it writes them. Both of these 
features should be generalized, of course.

TIA!

-- 
Rick