rsync du (was rsync delete)

[Matt McCutchen]

On Sat, 2007-12-22 at 18:47 -0800, Jesse Thompson wrote:
> Now I'm interested in a new possibility however. Using rsync
> (connecting to a remote rsync server via rsync protocol) is there a
> way to measure the size of a directory, kind of like du, without
> having to transfer it?

Yes.  Do a transfer of the directory in dry-run mode (so no data is
actually copied) and pass --stats.  Look at the "Total file size"
statistic, which is the total size of all regular file data and symlink
target paths:

        $ rsync -na --stats remote::volume/directory/ /nonexistent/
        
        Number of files: 30
        Number of files transferred: 12
==> Total file size: 9148 bytes
        Total transferred file size: 9124 bytes
        Literal data: 0 bytes
        Matched data: 0 bytes
        File list size: 625
        File list generation time: 0.003 seconds
        File list transfer time: 0.000 seconds
        Total bytes sent: 737
        Total bytes received: 111
        
        sent 737 bytes  received 111 bytes  1696.00 bytes/sec
        total size is 9148  speedup is 10.79 (DRY RUN)

If you like, you can account for inodes and directories (very
approximately) by adding some multiple of the "File list size".

Matt