Operation not supported (95)

[Matt McCutchen]

On Thu, 2009-10-29 at 21:11 +0000, List Reader wrote:
> While I haven't 
> found the exact cause of the error, in my search I did find some 
> suggestions that XFS is a better choice for backing up from HFS+, so I 
> tried that and this error disappeared.
> 
> This one remains though:
> 
> rsync: rsync_xal_set: lsetxattr("Pictures/...[snip].../IMG_0960 
> (2)/IMG_0960.tiff","user.com.apple.ResourceFork") failed: Argument list 
> too long (7)
> rsync: rsync_xal_set: 
> lsetxattr("Pictures/...[snip].../Image0001.TIF","user.com.apple.ResourceFork") 
> failed: Argument list too long (7)

It looks like you've hit a limit on the size of the attribute value.  I
tested on both xfs and reiserfs and saw a limit at exactly 65536 bytes;
I don't know whether this is a coincidence or the limit is actually in
Linux.

I don't see an easy way around this, so your options would be:

1. Figure out whether you actually need the massive resource-fork data:
make a copy of the source file, run "setfattr -x com.apple.ResourceFork"
on the copy, and see if you've lost anything important.  If not, just
keep the stripped file.

2. If you do need the resource fork, you could have your backup script
split the file into a plain data file and a separate file with the xattr
information, using the "xattr" command or something that will make a
standard AppleDouble file if you like that.  Put the plain data file in
a separate tree and add that tree as the first source argument to rsync,
so that the plain data file overlays the original and rsync won't get
xattr errors.  Reply if you want to take this approach and need more
help.

-- 
Matt