Openrsync and macOS -- Anyone gotten it working with -r option to OpenBSD host?

[Sean Kamath]

Hi.

Just curious if anyone has been able to use rsync (with the -r option) on a 
macOS Sequoia machine to an OpenBSD machine.

While we all love a good thrashing of vendors screwing things up, I don’t want 
to start that thread.  Instead, I’m asking if there’s a simple workaround, and 
providing my stupid workaround in case anyone else runs into this.

I’m asking because my (somewhat simple) rsync command started failing when 
openrsync started being used on macOS with:

$ rsync --rsync-path=openrsync -a -e ssh local_path/. remote_host:/remote_path
...
openrsync: unknown option --dirs
[output of openrsync —help]


Indeed, openrsync on OpenBSD (7.6 and 7.6) don’t have a “—dirs” option, which 
seems to only be used with the -r option.

Seems odd that openrsync (on Apple) -> openrsync (on OpenBSD) wouldn’t work, 
but who knows what Apple has done to this under the hood, even though the man 
page says:

HISTORY
     The openrsync utility has been available since OpenBSD 6.5.

AUTHORS
     The openrsync utility was written by Kristaps Dzonsons <krist...@bsd.lv>.

The man page and options are wildly different, so I’m thinking they’ve just 
pulled the guts of the protocol from openrsync and are using the samba 
front-end code, but who knows.

I solved this problem by writing a stupid shell script and using that as the 
executable:

#!/bin/ksh

i=0
for a in "$@"
do
    case $a in
        --dirs) continue
           ;;
        *) NEWARGS[$i]="$a"
           i=$((i + 1))
           ;;
    esac
done

exec openrsync ${NEWARGS[@]}