Questions with rsync

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Wed, 2009-06-03 at 19:02 -0700, Gordon Messmer wrote:
> On 06/03/2009 06:05 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > On Wed, 2009-06-03 at 10:05 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> >> On Wed, 2009-06-03 at 03:02 -0700, GMS S wrote:
> >>> Will this command do the job for backup?
> >>>
> >>> rsync -vpa / /home/user/backup
> >> Er, isn't this recursive?
> >
> > What I meant to say was "isn't this an infinite loop?" The entire
> > filesystem rooted at / is being copied into one of its subtrees.
> >
> > The answer is that rsync is clever enough to avoid this (I tried it on a
> > test directory),
> 
> Try it a second time.
> 
> rsync ain't that smart.  The only reason it worked the first time is 
> that rsync built a list of files/directories to copy before it copied 
> them.  With rsync 3, it only builds that list for one directory at a 
> time.  Older versions built the entire list before beginning.  You'll 
> get different results with the two versions, IIRC.

Make sense. Even more reason to avoid the above incantation and use a
standard package.

poc