Batch file larger than it should/could be?

[Petros Aggelatos]

Hi,

I'm trying to understand the behaviour of rsync when used with the
--write-batch or --only-write-batch options. I did some tests where I had
two fairly big file trees, think a rootfs, where their only difference was
an extra file containing only one character. I noticed the batch file was
~100kB and after inspecting it with hexdump it looks like it contains the
whole list of files including their timestamp and possibly size? (not sure
about that) even though none of them have changed.

I tried several options to see if there is one of them that will cause the
batch file to only contain the changed files but couldn't find any. My
current approach is to find the list of files that changed between the 2
trees and then create a batch file using rsync invoked with only those
specific files. In that case the one char change produces a 110 byte batch
file.

Is there a reason that rsync includes the list of all the files in the
batch file? Could this be improved by doing what I now do manually in rsync
itself?

Best regards,
Petros Angelatos
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