rsync - Jun 2008 - fully-qualified symlinks & --exclude question

Greetings!

I've ran into a couple difficulties for a particular rsync use-case
I'm involved in implementing - hoping someone here might be able to
clue me in!

I've got an existing linux box, with a particular directory that needs
to be mirrored onto another server, into a different base path on that
server - i.e.:

server1:/var/lib/bar/ to server2:/backupdir/var/lib/bar/

Now, server1:/var/lib/bar/ contains hundreds of files which are each
symlink'd to one of a few files in the same directory:

/var/lib/bar/base_file1
/var/lib/bar/base_file2
/var/lib/bar/base_file3
/var/lib/bar/foo -> /var/lib/bar/base_file1
/var/lib/bar/bar -> /var/lib/bar/base_file3
/var/lib/bar/blah -> /var/lib/bar/base_file2
/var/lib/bar/goober -> /var/lib/bar/base_file2

The first problem is that these symlinks (on server1) are all using
the fully-qualified path - which is causing me problems because
/var/lib/bar/ doesn't exist on server2, but rather in
/backupdir/var/lib/bar/ ...

Is there a way of forcing rsync to link these relatively rather than
fully-qualitive? So that (for an exampe) the rsync from
server1:/var/lib/bar/foo to server2 ends up like:

server2:/backupdir/var/lib/bar/foo -> 
server2:/backupdir/var/lib/bar/base_file1

rather than (what it's currently doing):

server2:/backupdir/var/lib/bar/foo -> server2:/var/lib/bar/base_file1

(...which results in a broken link)


Second question:

Is there a way of using --exclude to reference symlink _targets_, rather
than the filename itself?

For example:

/var/lib/bar/foo -> /var/lib/bar/base_file1
/var/lib/bar/blah -> /var/lib/bar/base_file2
/var/lib/bar/goober -> /var/lib/bar/base_file2

I want to use an --exclude which specifies: "all symlinks that link to
/var/lib/bar/base_file1 and /var/lib/bar/base_file2"

So, --exclude="foo blah" isn't what I'm after, because that
will fail
to contain 'goober'... remember we're talking hundreds of symlinks -
pointing to just a couple/few target files; my --exclude would simply
be unmanageable.


Many thanks for any advice/solutions!

On Sun, 2008-06-22 at 22:26 +0000, Corey wrote:
> I've got an existing linux box, with a particular directory that needs
> to be mirrored onto another server, into a different base path on that
> server - i.e.:
> 
> server1:/var/lib/bar/ to server2:/backupdir/var/lib/bar/
> 
> Now, server1:/var/lib/bar/ contains hundreds of files which are each
> symlink'd to one of a few files in the same directory:
> 
> /var/lib/bar/base_file1
> /var/lib/bar/base_file2
> /var/lib/bar/base_file3
> /var/lib/bar/foo -> /var/lib/bar/base_file1
> /var/lib/bar/bar -> /var/lib/bar/base_file3
> /var/lib/bar/blah -> /var/lib/bar/base_file2
> /var/lib/bar/goober -> /var/lib/bar/base_file2
> 
> The first problem is that these symlinks (on server1) are all using
> the fully-qualified path - which is causing me problems because
> /var/lib/bar/ doesn't exist on server2, but rather in
> /backupdir/var/lib/bar/ ...
> 
> Is there a way of forcing rsync to link these relatively rather than
> fully-qualitive? So that (for an exampe) the rsync from
> server1:/var/lib/bar/foo to server2 ends up like:
> 
> server2:/backupdir/var/lib/bar/foo -> 
> server2:/backupdir/var/lib/bar/base_file1
> 
> rather than (what it's currently doing):
> 
> server2:/backupdir/var/lib/bar/foo -> server2:/var/lib/bar/base_file1
> 
> (...which results in a broken link)
No, rsync does not support this kind of symlink rewriting, unless you
want to hack the "munge symlinks" code to prepend /backupdir instead
of /rsyncd-munged/ and remove the check that the prepended directory
doesn't exist.

In this situation, I would just change the source symlinks to relative
paths.  If there's a reason why you don't want to do that, tell me and I
might be able to figure something out.
> Second question:
> 
> Is there a way of using --exclude to reference symlink _targets_, rather
> than the filename itself?
No.  There's an enhancement request for this capability:

https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1670

Matt
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