rsync: Please add an option to ignore vanished files

[Justin Pryzby]

Hi Everyone,

The following request was received from a Debian user; could you
comment on it?  I think this seems reasonable, although the cron
output can be fixed by writing to a temporary file and using grep -v.
(The temporary file is necessary to avoid discarding the exit code,
 although that may not be needed in the case of rsync, since it writes
 that to stderr).

On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 02:28:50PM +0300, Cyril Bouthors wrote:
> Package: rsync
> Version: 2.6.6-1
> Severity: wishlist
> 
> I make nightly backups of 1TB+ of data that are continuously
> read-write accessed and I constantly have *huge* output of the cron
> job because of vanished files:
> 
> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_003323885e425f2a67e69e0ac4c24124"
> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_033cc2efa0b325a2d154c082995d216b"
> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_11460e1bd071bc56e385bd36d00b55c5"
> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_182e6dfcc0373bef667ed0f902aa93d5"
> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_1d274c8d694cbdd819c65ae1e5d15b91"
> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_1e77d2fd4d81da9a8614cd10347c08b5"
> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_1f23f36129d192a8522842aa33bca2eb"
> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_23c5d3f51ea5a02ee981c180c84d0bd0"
> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_245feab1eba25a857108e6571d3405e6"
> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_3172de12d16979a863d1fda04545ca89"
> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_405b9d38341b955afcbae9519678a319"
> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_418f14e27f10725506b3100ca0a8e643"
> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_4bf5cfe9dc12c7480f016dc1509fbfa7"
> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_4e0a051348d9f11608f6aafa07b2c401"
> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_4f070d18b9d7992f40d997a1e1a19bae"
> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_53a52b6406ccbf36d3abad6188bb3add"
> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_56a724e0d24e8a217acfc3bc0b039745"
> file has vanished: "/drbd/var/www/tmp/sess_56e60ad1a0908df5617adf04147247e0"
> (...)
> [skipped tens of thousands of lines]
> 
> I'd like rsync to provide an option called '--ignore-vanished' that
> would not display those warnings anymore and not exit with value 24
> ("Partial transfer due to vanished source files" according to the
> manpage).
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> -- System Information:
> Debian Release: testing/unstable
> Architecture: i386 (i686)
> Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
> Kernel: Linux 2.6.15-1-686
> Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
> 
> Versions of packages rsync depends on:
> ii  libc6                         2.3.6-1    GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
> ii  libpopt0                      1.7-5      lib for parsing cmdline parameters
> 
> rsync recommends no packages.
> 
> -- no debconf information
> 
> -- 
> Cyril Bouthors