On Sat, 19 Aug 2017 00:56:55 -0400,
Walter Dnes wrote:
>
> I've RTFM'd, and it looks like there is no way to get rsync to copy
> over symlinked directories as symlinks. E.g. I build Pale Moon browser
> from source for 3 machines at home. I prefer downloading the source
> once and symlinking to it from 3 different working directories. I also
> have a personal project where I analyze the same text data files in 3
> different ways. It makes things so much simpler to use the same code,
> with different runtime parameters. So I symlink the main data directory
> to 3 working directories. Even "better" (or worse) I've got a situation
> where I symlink directories to... other symlinked directories. Yes;
> symlinks pointing to symlinks work, even for directories.
>
> Unfortunately, rsync will not create a symlink where appropriate, but
> will de-reference the symlink, and duplicate multiple gigabytes of data
> needlessly. I eventually gave up trying, and made a tarball, and pushed
> it over to my "hot backup" machine, and extracted it there. That works
> OK for the initial setup, but is painfull for "minor incremental"
> updates.
>
> Am I missing something glaringly obvious, or is this a limitation of
> rsync? If so, is there another tool that can copy over symlinked
> directories properly?
I always use -av which copies simlinks correctly. -H is necessary to
copy hardlinks. If you need it -l also ensures this.
--
Your life is like a penny. You're going to lose it. The question is:
How do
you spend it?
John Covici
[email protected]