Oh, and since the shell instructions below are idempotent, you could put them
into a script and then execute this from the tippety top of your file tree
after every transfer, not caring which files are new or modified:
find . -exec <script-name> {} \;
My use of the option is not idempotent though, so I need a more elaborate
script (which also handles other things).
I hope you're not looking for a solution that compares the xattrs (which I know
nothing about) in order to determine whether or not to transfer files, I'd want
two months for that ;-). Would be fixed if the source time stamp changes when
xattrs are changed, though.
Cheers again,
Stein
> On 16 Feb 2025, at 14:39, Stein Vidar Hagfors Haugan
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Actually... I have made an extremely small and simple patch implementing an
> option --time-only, and I have made a pull request for it:
> https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/pull/719
>
> It allows you to truncate your local files after transfer. Outside of rsync,
> you must then truncate the file to zero size, then set the time stamp back to
> the original time. On the next run, the file will not be retransmitted as it
> looks only to the file stamp, ignoring the size.
>
> The patch does not do the truncation & time preservation, but that can be
> handled by a postprocessing shell.
>
> I use this b/c we need to sync some data that's stored in uncompressed files,
> but we want them to be stored compressed on our systems. So we create a
> gzipped version, truncate the original and set the time stamp back to the
> original.
>
> Does that work for you? Of course, it would be even better if one could
> implement a --truncate option, too (probably easiest to slip it into the
> existing code post-transfer, right before the time stamp is set to that of
> the source file).
>
> The post-processing is quite simple though:
>
> ~> ls -l original-file.txt
> -rw-r--r--. 1 steinhh astuser 1010880 Jan 3 2017 original-file.txt
> ~> touch --reference=original-file.txt /tmp/reference
> ~> truncate -s 0 original-file.txt
> ~> touch --reference=/tmp/reference original-file.txt
> ~> ls -l original-file.txt
> -rw-r--r--. 1 steinhh astuser 0 Jan 3 2017 original-file.txt
>
> I'll bake it into another (or the same) patch if you give me a month of time,
> never mind the money. A month includes overhead & a nice profit, I really
> need the time ;-).
>
> Cheers, hope this will work for you!
>
> Stein Haugan
>
>> On 15 Feb 2025, at 21:24, Peter B. via rsync <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Hello everyone :)
>>
>> I'd like to follow up on this thread of mine, if that's okay?
>>
>> Is there anything I could do to get the feature functionality of "using
>> rsync to create a thin (attributes-only) copy" upstream on the long term?
>>
>> Could I talk to a developer, for hire?
>> I'm really professionally interested in such a feature, as it would greatly
>> make our lives in the galleries-libraries-archives-museums (GLAM) world :D
>>
>>
>> Thank you very much in advance!
>> Peter B.
>>
>>
>> On 11.12.24 17:17, Peter B. via rsync wrote:
>>> On 12/10/24 21:15, Roland Kletzing wrote:
>>>> hello,
>>>> that sounds interesting - just one question: what about file size? is
>>>> it always zero or is it set to the original size and the file contents
>>>> are empty ?
>>>
>>> The filesize (IMO) should stay 0 bytes, since the file actually /is/ empty.
>>> I believe forging the filesize number in the filesystem to its source
>>> (original) size would be more misleading than helpful...
>>>
>>> When working with xattrs, one gets used to 0-Byte files pretty quickly
>>> though :)
>>>
>>> However, I like to store the original filesize as "yet-another" metadata
>>> key/value xattr information with the 0-Byte files. Works like a charm and
>>> so it's clear that "there is no payload" - but it's a stub, referring to
>>> another file.
>>>
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Peter
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
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