compression of source and target files

[Kenneth Simpson]

Chuck Wolber wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Kenneth Simpson wrote:
>
>   
>> Hi - there's a flag for rsync to compress the files in transit - is it 
>> possible to compress one side (target) with gzip and have rsync still 
>> work correctly?
>>     
>
> It'll still work correctly, but compressing a compressed file can actually 
> make it slightly bigger and wastes CPU cycles in the process.
>
> ..Chuck..
>
>   
 Sorry, I neglected to mention the source is uncompressed but
we need to compress the target file because we're running out
of disk space and the files are highly compressible.


We can't compress the source since the files are large and
compressing the source would create other problems.
 
The original thought was to use a file system with compression (I
think Linux has such a beast) but this would at least require a
kernel rebuild which we won't be able to do for awhile.

The second thought was that we might be able to gzip on the fly
and have rsync work correctly (since it's compressing them in
transit.)