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Kyle Brandt
Asked: 2010-01-07 06:05:23 +0800 CST

Tell Rsync to Skip Current file During Transfer?

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Is there a way to tell rsync to skip its current file while a sync is in progress, maybe by sending it a particular signal?

I already know about ignoring based on patterns, but this would be handy to me sometimes.

rsync

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I'm not familiar with such functionality, and the manual page for the current version doesn't make mention either. Short of browsing thru the source looking for "hidden features" that aren't mentioned in the manual page I think it's safe to assume that there's not any such functionality.

    I agree, though, that it sounds like it could be a handy feature.

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  2. Sadly, the answer is "no", but there is a Bug Report in the rsync Bugzilla requesting this enhancement. Maybe someday...

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  3. I always kill rsync (control-c) and re-run with an --exclude option and possibly --delete. Since rsync leaves the destination directory partially updated, the second run should be faster because you can essentially start where you left off.

    You might also look at the partial-dir option for large files.

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  4. The rsync feature request mentioned by @dean-serenevy has a workaround:

    1. Backup sourcefile if still needed, e.g. cp --reflink=always --preserve largefile largefile.backup
    2. Truncate the file: echo > largefile
    3. Wait for rsync to detect that something is wrong. This may take a while but rsync should at least stop writing more data to the target file. When an error is detected, rsync will try again, see that the file is a lot shorter (1 byte long, a single newline character) and update the target to match it.
    4. Restore the backup: mv largefile.backup largefile if the inode number does not matter, cat largfile.backup > largefile if the inode number must stay the same (at the cost of requiring twice the space temporarily). Also consider ownership, permissions, extended attributes, sparseness and special filesystem features such as compression and de-duplication.
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