On Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:14:17 Ciprian Dorin Craciun wrote: > 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.
Have a look at 'tripwire'. It's primarily an intrusion detection tool, but it does the job by recording file meta-data and checksums, then checking to see if they have changed. I can't remember if it handles ACL's, as it's been a few years since I used it. -- Reverend Paul Colquhoun, ULC. http://andor.dropbear.id.au/ Asking for technical help in newsgroups? Read this first: http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#intro
