ssync(1)ssync(1)NAMEssync - minimalistic filesystem sync tool
SYNOPSISssync [options]
ssyncd [options]
DESCRIPTION
Ssync is a minimalistic filesystem synchronization utility. Its primary
goals are reliability, correctness, and speed in syncing extremely
large filesystems over fast, local network connections. Ssync does not
implement encryption, compression, differencing algorithms, or remote
synchronization over a pipe such as rsh / ssh since those features are
already well covered by other utilities such as rsync.
Ssync works well on large filesystems and can handle filesystem objects
with unusual and non-ASCII characters in their names while correctly
preserving all symbolic and hard links and all mode bits. It can be run
at increased or decreased niceness and can provide several levels of
logging output. Several options allow complete control of synchroniza‐
tion behaviors such as selectively disabling updating of data, owner‐
ship, and modes, as well as updating only newer objects or just per‐
forming 'test runs'.
The basic behavior of both interactive and daemon versions of the pro‐
gram is to read a list of source and destination paths from a specified
work file and take whatever actions are necessary to make the destina‐
tions identical to the sources. Each line of the work file takes the
form:
<source path> | <destination path>
Any text following a # character to end of line in the work file is
considered a comment and ignored.
OPTIONS
All options may be set on the command line in either short or long form
as well as in a configuration file. For the interactive version
(ssync), the default configuration file is .ssyncrc in the current
directory. For the daemon (ssyncd), /usr/local/etc/ssyncd.conf is the
default. Settings in the configuration file have the same name as the
long option and take a form such as:
work-file: /usr/local/etc/ssyncd.work
Any text following a # character to end of line in the configuration
file is considered a comment and ignored. Example configuration and
work files, as well as some more extensive development rationale may be
found in the file README.HTML. If you installed a binary package, this
file as well as some examples should be located in your distribution's
doc directory for this package. If you built from a source tarball,
then it should have included the documentation and example files.
-h --help
display usage message and version
-c PATH --conf-path=PATH
read alternative config file from the default
-i NUM --interval=NUM
number of seconds to sleep between completing one run and start‐
ing the next
-w PATH --work-file=PATH
path for file containing work list (see also src-path and dst-
path)
-f PATH --src-path=PATH
alternative way to specify a single source path
-t PATH --dst-path=PATH
alternative way to specify a single destination path
-n (-20 - +20) --priority=(-20 - +20)
scheduling priority or 'niceness', lower numbers are more rude,
see renice(8), for more details
-F --no-detach
do not daemonize (use with log-mode: stderr)
-D --no-sync-data
do not sync data (content) of files
-T --no-sync-time
do not sync atime / mtime
-M --no-sync-meta
do not sync meta-data (uid / gid / mode)
-U --update-only
only sync things if source mtime is > destination mtime
-X --test
run sync procedure and collect statistics without actually modi‐
fying anything
-p PATH --pid-path=PATH
path for pid file
-m (file|syslog|stderr) --log-mode=(file|syslog|stderr)
logging mode
-l PATH --log-path=PATH
path for log file if using file based logging
-s STRING --log-ident=STRING
identification string if using syslog based logging
-v (0 - 5) --log-level=(0 - 5)
logging verbosity, 2 is default, 3 is errors only, 0 lists all
updates and deletions
FILES
$PWD/.ssync
default configuration file for ssync
/usr/local/etc/ssyncd.conf
default configuration file for ssyncd
/usr/local/etc/ssyncd.work
default work file for ssyncd
/var/log/ssyncd.log
default log file for ssyncd
/var/run/ssyncd.pid
default pid file for ssyncd
BUGS
Due to the simple-mindedness of the configuration file parser, paths
containing whitespaces and unusual characters in the work file will not
be parsed properly. This limitation does not apply to anything under‐
neath the specified paths, just the starting points as listed in the
work file.
AUTHOR
This manual page was written by Michael W. Shaffer <mwshaffer@angry‐
pot.com>,
March 22, 2002 ssync(1)
