rsync warning: some files vanished before they could be transferred (code24)

[Matt McCutchen]

On 7/20/07, Abdul Khan <akhan at systems.fleetwoodmetal.com> wrote:
> What does this line mean? Its been there in the summary every time i run
> the rsync command.
>
> rsync warning: some files vanished before they could be transferred
> (code 24) at main.c(977) [sender=2.6.9]
>
> Can anybody please shed the light about the error code?

When rsync starts up, the sender scans the source arguments and builds
a list of files to process and their metadata (the "file-list").
Later on, the receiver requests the data for each individual file it
doesn't have already.  If the file no longer exists when the sender
goes to open it to send the data, that warning is printed.

The warning is generally nothing to worry about, since the run is
still correct in the sense that the state of each destination file
reflects a state that the corresponding source file had at some
instant during the run.  (This property has one exception: if --delete
is on, the source and destination files originally differ, and then
the source file vanishes, the outdated file is left on the
destination, neither updated nor deleted; I proposed a way to fix this
at https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3653#c11 .)

If the output to stderr or the exit code 24 freaks out a tool that is
running rsync, you could use my "rsync-no-vanished" wrapper script (
https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3653#c8 )

Matt