Hi again, rsync list! I was heavily involved in rsync development and support back in 2005-2010. I've largely lost interest in that now and my knowledge of rsync is beginning to become stale, but I'm still a big fan and user of rsync, so I'm back with a user question. :) I did search the web and didn't find anything relevant.
I have a scenario in which regular files are created in a source directory over time and shouldn't change after creation. I run rsync periodically to copy the source to a destination, and if a source file differs from an existing destination file, I want rsync to warn me and not transfer it. For the "not transfer" part, I can use --ignore-existing, but I don't see a direct way to be warned only about source files that differ from existing destination files. If I use --info=SKIP1, rsync warns about all source files that exist on the destination, whether or not they differ. So as a workaround, after the --ignore-existing run, I'm using a separate dry run without --ignore-existing to warn about any remaining differences. Is there a better solution? Do people think that filing an enhancement request to show the --ignore-existing warning only for files with itemizable differences would be justified? My reading of the code also suggests that if the sender is malicious, --ignore-existing will not stop the receiver from processing a transfer of an existing destination file initiated by the sender, though I haven't attempted an actual test to confirm this. I can work around this security gap by transferring from the source to a temporary directory and then from there to the destination; in the second step, my local version of rsync serves as both sender and receiver, so there is no risk. I suspect several other rsync options may similarly not be enforced against a malicious peer. Is this worth fixing? Thanks, Matt -- Please use reply-all for most replies to avoid omitting the mailing list. To unsubscribe or change options: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html