Hello all! While struggling with managing various old backups --- just imagine 10 or so copies of almost the same content, some with `rsync`, some with `rdiff-backup`, yet some others on plain ISO's, all over a range of a few years --- I stumbled upon the following missing piece in the Linux tools ecosystem: a file-system crawler that records **only** meta-data, like all the info available through `stat`, plus an assortment of hashes of the files (at least MD5 and SHA-1,2 family), and optionally ACL's and extended attributes. Thus I was wondering if someone knows a tool that fits this description.
I must say I've tried to do my homework, and below are a few tools that come close, but not quite... (A) `rdup` is probably the closest to what I'm searching. However there are a few issues: * it's output format is not very parsable, especially in cases like symlinks, and a few other special cases; * it doesn't escape the file names --- and from some reason I have files containing escape sequences in them... * it records only SHA-1; * it doesn't handle ACL's or extended attributes; (B) `mtree` from FreeBSD. I found two ports of it for Linux, however my main concern is how parsable is the output... (C) `md5deep` (or `sha*deep`), which only records the checksum not other meta-data. Thus, are there any other alternatives? (Just to be clear, I don't need a "backup" solution, just something to record file-system meta-data. Maybe a "meta-backup" solution... :) ) Ciprian.