rsync hang at end

[Robert DuToit]

Hi All,
   My wrapper application for rsync 3.0.2 on osx has been working  
smoothly except for reports of it hanging on the last file of the  
transfer to a local firewire drive. We seem to have solved the mystery  
of the slow transfers  but now, every four or five runs, it hangs at  
the last file to transfer and refuses to quit. Activity Monitor shows  
three rsync processes all at 0%CPU at that point (and virtual memory  
allocated of 3.74GB, 2.6GB and 2.6GB!). The last file incidentally is / 
usr/standalone/bootx.xcoff

My friend is using the standard options

-aHAXN --fileflags --force-change   --stats -v --progress

on an Intel mac copying his system of 100GB, or 1 million files, to  
the external drive. As I said, it works well and always copies all of  
the files perfectly. When the hang occurs, the output shows nothing  
unusual - it just stops at the last file transferred and does not  
proceed to shut itself off. We havn't managed to run with -vvv when  
this happens but will try to catch it with that now. I should also  
mention that rsync is launched via do shell script and the output sent  
to a log file in /tmp which the app reads progress from...

I googled around and found references to an rsync end hang that said  
the child process wasn't getting the quit signal from parent rsync....  
(on rsync 2.5.5)

Don't know if that is relevant at all...

Any thoughts, anyone?

thanks so much for this great tool!

Rob D