--copy-unsafe-links unexpected behavior with unsafe symlinks
crstml at libero.it
crstml at libero.it
Mon Jan 3 12:56:54 UTC 2022
Hello Wayne
Thank you very much for trying to help,
I have the following three observations:
1) As recommended, I have searched the manual of rsync in order to try
to find your interpretation about what is going on but the only relevant
fact that I was able to find was how rsync defines unsafe links:
Symbolic links are considered unsafe if they are absolute
symlinks (start with /), empty, or if they contain enough ".."
components to ascend from the directory being copied.
In my case (I copy and paste below my original example for commodity)
TST/
+-- outside1
| |
| +-- outside1-file.txt
|
+-- outside2-file.txt
|
+-- tree
+-- inside.txt
|
+-- lnk-ans.txt -> ../../ans.txt
|
+-- o1-file.txt -> ../outside1/outside1-file.txt
|
+-- o1-folder -> ../outside1
|
+-- o2-file.txt -> ../outside2-file.txt
when I run the commands
$ cd TST
$ rsync --copy-unsafe-links -avz --delete tree XXX
In my opinion
tree/o1-file.txt
tree/o1-folder
tree/o2-file.txt
contain enough .. to ascend from the directory being copied (which
is "tree")
2) I've also taken into account your observation that
In this case, the "tree" directory is a part of the transfer
inside the top-of-transfer dir (the current directory)
which seems unusual to me (because in my case the directory being
copied is "tree" and not the current directory (am I missing something?))
and started the command rsync command from a another folder:
$ cd ~/dev
$ rsync --copy-unsafe-links -avz --delete ~/tmp/TST/tree ~/tmp/XXX
The result is the same
~/tmp/TST/tree/lnk-ans.txt
is copied as a file
And
~/tmp/TST/tree/o1-file.txt
~/tmp/TST/tree/o1-folder
~/tmp/TST/tree/o2-file.txt
are copied as broken symblinks.
3) I don't think that the intended behavior of rsync is to consider safe
the symlinks that point to files and folders that are located just above
the directory being copied ("tree" in this case).
If this would be the intended behavior, then there will not be possibile
to specify that you want and entire directory to be copied (with copies
of the files pointed by unsafe links), because independently of what you
specify in the command line as the source tree to be copied there will
always be the posibility that the tree contains some symlink that points
to a file that is outside the subtree but located under the parent that
contains the tree and this file will not be copied.
Best regards
Cristian
> On Sun, Nov 28, 2021 at 12:53 PM Cristian via rsync <rsync at lists.samba.org>
> wrote:
>
>> $ rsync --copy-unsafe-links -avz --delete tree XXX
>>
> In this case, the "tree" directory is a part of the transfer inside the
> top-of-transfer dir (the current directory). Thus any symlinks that don't
> try to escape the current directory are considered to be OK. You should
> instead suffix "tree" with a slash and add "tree" to your destination path:
>
> $ rsync --copy-unsafe-links -aivz --delete tree/ host:/old/path/tree/
>
> This is discussed in the man page
> <https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/rsync.1> (search for "unsafe").
>
> ..wayne..
>
More information about the rsync
mailing list