NEWS for rsync 3.4.1 (16 Jan 2025)

Release 3.4.1 is a fix for regressions introduced in 3.4.0

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

fixed handling of -H flag with conflict in internal flag values
fixed a user after free in logging of failed rename
fixed build on systems without openat()
removed dependency on alloca() in bundled popt

fix to permissions handling in the developer release script

NEWS for rsync 3.4.0 (15 Jan 2025)

Release 3.4.0 is a security release that fixes a number of important vulnerabilities.

For more details on the vulnerabilities please see the CERT report
https://kb.cert.org/vuls/id/952657

Changes in this version:

PROTOCOL NUMBER:

The protocol number was changed to 32 to make it easier for
administrators to check their servers have been updated

SECURITY FIXES:

Many thanks to Simon Scannell, Pedro Gallegos, and Jasiel Spelman at
Google Cloud Vulnerability Research and Aleksei Gorban (Loqpa) for
discovering these vulnerabilities and working with the rsync project
to develop and test fixes.

CVE-2024-12084 - Heap Buffer Overflow in Checksum Parsing.
CVE-2024-12085 - Info Leak via uninitialized Stack contents defeats ASLR.
CVE-2024-12086 - Server leaks arbitrary client files.
CVE-2024-12087 - Server can make client write files outside of destination directory using symbolic links.
CVE-2024-12088 - --safe-links Bypass.
CVE-2024-12747 - symlink race condition.

BUG FIXES:

Fixed the included popt to avoid a memory error on modern gcc versions.
Fixed an incorrect extern variable's type that caused an ACL issue on macOS.
Fixed IPv6 configure check

INTERNAL:

Updated included popt to version 1.19.

Various improvements to the release scripts and git setup.
Improved packaging/var-checker to identify variable type issues.
added FreeBSD and Solaris CI builds

NEWS for rsync 3.3.0 (6 Apr 2024)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

Fixed a bug with --sparse --inplace where a trailing gap in the source
file would not clear out the trailing data in the destination file.
Fixed an buffer overflow in the checksum2 code if SHA1 is being used for
the checksum2 algorithm.
Fixed an issue when rsync is compiled using _FORTIFY_SOURCE so that the
extra tests don't complain about a strlcpy() limit value (which was too
large, even though it wasn't possible for the larger value to cause an
overflow).
Add a backtick to the list of characters that the filename quoting needs to
escape using backslashes.
Fixed a string-comparison issue in the internal handling of --progress (a
locale such as tr_TR.utf-8 needed the internal triggering of --info options
to use upper-case flag names to ensure that they match).
Make sure that a local transfer marks the sender side as trusted.
Change the argv handling to work with a newer popt library -- one that likes
to free more data than it used to.
Rsync now calls OpenSSL_add_all_algorithms() when compiled against an older
openssl library.
Fixed a problem in the daemon auth for older protocols (29 and before) if the
openssl library is being used to compute MD4 checksums.
Fixed rsync -VV on Cygwin -- it needed a flush of stdout.
Fixed an old stats bug that counted devices as symlinks.

ENHANCEMENTS:

Enhanced rrsync with the -no-overwrite option that allows you to ensure
that existing files on your restricted but writable directory can't be
modified.
Enhanced the manpages to mark links with .UR & .UE. If your nroff doesn't
support these idioms, touch the file .md2man-force in the source directory
so that md-convert gets called with the --force-link-text option, and
that should ensure that your manpages are still readable even with the
ignored markup.
Some manpage improvements on the handling of [global] modules.
Changed the mapfrom & mapto perl scripts (in the support dir) into a single
python script named idmap. Converted a couple more perl scripts into python.
Changed the mnt-excl perl script (in the support dir) into a python script.

Updated config.guess (timestamp 2023-01-01) and config.sub (timestamp
2023-01-21).

NEWS for rsync 3.2.7 (20 Oct 2022)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

Fixed the client-side validating of the remote sender's filtering behavior.
More fixes for the "unrequested file-list name" name, including a copy of
"/" with --relative enabled and a copy with a lot of related paths with
--relative enabled (often derived from a --files-from list).
When rsync gets an unpack error on an ACL, mention the filename.
Avoid over-setting sanitize_paths when a daemon is serving "/" (even if
"use chroot" is false).

ENHANCEMENTS:

Added negotiated daemon-auth support that allows a stronger checksum digest
to be used to validate a user's login to the daemon. Added SHA512, SHA256,
and SHA1 digests to MD5 & MD4. These new digests are at the highest priority
in the new daemon-auth negotiation list.
Added support for the SHA1 digest in file checksums. While this tends to be
overkill, it is available if someone really needs it. This overly-long
checksum is at the lowest priority in the normal checksum negotiation list.
See --checksum-choice (--cc) and the RSYNC_CHECKSUM_LIST
environment var for how to customize this.
Improved the xattr hash table to use a 64-bit key without slowing down the
key's computation. This should make extra sure that a hash collision doesn't
happen.
If the --version option is repeated (e.g. -VV) then the information is
output in a (still readable) JSON format. Client side only.
The script support/json-rsync-version is available to get the JSON style
version output from any rsync. The script accepts either text on stdin
or an arg that specifies an rsync executable to run with a doubled
--version option. If the text we get isn't already in JSON format, it is
converted. Newer rsync versions will provide more complete json info than
older rsync versions. Various tweaks are made to keep the flag names
consistent across versions.
The use chroot daemon parameter now defaults to "unset"
so that rsync can use chroot when it works and a sanitized copy when chroot
is not supported (e.g., for a non-root daemon). Explicitly setting the
parameter to true or false (on or off) behaves the same way as before.
The --fuzzy option was optimized a bit to try to cut down on the amount of
computations when considering a big pool of files. The simple heuristic from
Kenneth Finnegan resulted in about a 2x speedup.
If rsync is forced to use protocol 29 or before (perhaps due to talking to an
rsync before 3.0.0), the modify time of a file is limited to 4-bytes. Rsync
now interprets this value as an unsigned integer so that a current year past
2038 can continue to be represented. This does mean that years prior to 1970
cannot be represented in an older protocol, but this trade-off seems like the
right choice given that (1) 2038 is very rapidly approaching, and (2) newer
protocols support a much wider range of old and new dates.
The rsync client now treats an empty destination arg as an error, just like
it does for an empty source arg. This doesn't affect a host: arg (which is
treated the same as host:.) since the arg is not completely empty. The use
of --old-args (including via RSYNC_OLD_ARGS) allows the
prior behavior of treating an empty destination arg as a ".".

The checksum code now uses openssl's EVP methods, which gets rid of various
deprecation warnings and makes it easy to support more digest methods. On
newer systems, the MD4 digest is marked as legacy in the openssl code, which
makes openssl refuse to support it via EVP. You can choose to ignore this
and allow rsync's MD4 code to be used for older rsync connections (when
talking to an rsync prior to 3.0.0) or you can choose to configure rsync to
tell openssl to enable legacy algorithms (see below).
A simple openssl config file is supplied that can be installed for rsync to
use. If you install packaging/openssl-rsync.cnf to a public spot (such as
/etc/ssl/openssl-rsync.cnf) and then run configure with the option
--with-openssl-conf=/path/name.cnf, this will cause rsync to export the
configured path in the OPENSSL_CONF environment variable (when the variable
is not already set). This will enable openssl's MD4 code for rsync to use.
The packager may wish to include an explicit "use chroot = true" in the top
section of their supplied /etc/rsyncd.conf file if the daemon is being
installed to run as the root user (though rsync should behave the same even
with the value unset, a little extra paranoia doesn't hurt).
I've noticed that some packagers haven't installed support/nameconvert for
users to use in their chrooted rsync configs. Even if it is not installed
as an executable script (to avoid a python3 dependency) it would be good to
install it with the other rsync-related support scripts.
It would be good to add support/json-rsync-version to the list of installed
support scripts.

NEWS for rsync 3.2.6 (9 Sep 2022)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

More path-cleaning improvements in the file-list validation code to avoid
rejecting of valid args.
A file-list validation fix for a --files-from file that ends
without a line-terminating character.
Added a safety check that prevents the sender from removing destination files
when a local copy using --remove-source-files has some files
that are shared between the sending & receiving hierarchies, including the
case where the source dir & destination dir are identical.
Fixed a bug in the internal MD4 checksum code that could cause the digest
to be sporadically incorrect (the openssl version was/is fine).
A minor tweak to rrsync added "copy-devices" to the list of known args, but
left it disabled by default.

ENHANCEMENTS:

Rename --protect-args to --secluded-args to make it
clearer how it differs from the default backslash-escaped arg-protecting
behavior of rsync. The old option names are still accepted. The
environment-variable override did not change its name.

The configure option --with-protected-args was renamed to
--with-secluded-args. This option makes --secluded-args the default
rsync behavior instead of using backslash escaping for protecting args.
The mkgitver script now makes sure that a .git dir/file is in the top-level
source dir before calling git describe. It also runs a basic check on the
version value. This should avoid using an unrelated git description for
rsync's version.

The configure script no longer sets the -pedantic-errors CFLAG (which it
used to try to do only for gcc).
The name_num_obj struct was modified to allow its dynamic name_num_item list
to be initialized in a better way.

NEWS for rsync 3.2.5 (14 Aug 2022)

Changes in this version:

SECURITY FIXES:

Added some file-list safety checking that helps to ensure that a rogue
sending rsync can't add unrequested top-level names and/or include recursive
names that should have been excluded by the sender. These extra safety
checks only require the receiver rsync to be updated. When dealing with an
untrusted sending host, it is safest to copy into a dedicated destination
directory for the remote content (i.e. don't copy into a destination
directory that contains files that aren't from the remote host unless you
trust the remote host). Fixes CVE-2022-29154.
A fix for CVE-2022-37434 in the bundled zlib (buffer overflow issue).

BUG FIXES:

Fixed the handling of filenames specified with backslash-quoted wildcards
when the default remote-arg-escaping is enabled.
Fixed the configure check for signed char that was causing a host that
defaults to unsigned characters to generate bogus rolling checksums. This
made rsync send mostly literal data for a copy instead of finding matching
data in the receiver's basis file (for a file that contains high-bit
characters).
Lots of manpage improvements, including an attempt to better describe how
include/exclude filters work.
If rsync is compiled with an xxhash 0.8 library and then moved to a system
with a dynamically linked xxhash 0.7 library, we now detect this and disable
the XX3 hashes (since these routines didn't stabilize until 0.8).

ENHANCEMENTS:

The --trust-sender option was added as a way to bypass the
extra file-list safety checking (should that be required).

A note to those wanting to patch older rsync versions: the changes in this
release requires the quoted argument change from 3.2.4. Then, you'll want
every single code change from 3.2.5 since there is no fluff in this release.
The build date that goes into the manpages is now based on the developer's
release date, not on the build's local-timezone interpretation of the date.

Configure now defaults GETGROUPS_T to gid_t when cross compiling.
Configure now looks for the bsd/string.h include file in order to fix the
build on a host that has strlcpy() in the main libc but not defined in the
main string.h file.

NEWS for rsync 3.2.4 (15 Apr 2022)

Changes in this version:

BEHAVIOR CHANGES:

A new form of arg protection was added that works similarly to the older
--protect-args (-s) option but in a way that avoids
breaking things like rrsync (the restricted rsync script): rsync now uses
backslash escaping for sending "shell-active" characters to the remote shell
(such as $(){}<>#& and others). This includes spaces, so fetching a remote
file via a quoted filename value now works by default without any extra
quoting:
```
    rsync -aiv host:'a simple file.pdf' .
```
Wildcards are not escaped in filename args, but they are escaped in options
like the --suffix and --usermap values.

If a script depends on the old arg behavior (perhaps because it quotes or
protects the args already, or perhaps because it expects arg splitting),
there are two easy ways to get things going with a modern rsync: either
export RSYNC_OLD_ARGS=1 in the script's environment (perhaps in the script
itself) or add the option --old-args to the rsync commands
that are run. See also the ADVANCED USAGE section of rsync's
manpage for how to use a more modern arg style.
A long-standing bug was preventing rsync from figuring out the current
locale's decimal point character, which made rsync always output numbers
using the "C" locale. Since this is now fixed in 3.2.4, a script that
parses rsync's decimal numbers (e.g. from the verbose footer) may want to
setup the environment in a way that the output continues to be in the C
locale. For instance, one of the following should work fine:
```
    export LC_ALL=C.UTF-8
```
or if iconv translations are needed:
```
    if [ "${LC_ALL:-}" ]; then
        export LANG="$LC_ALL"
        export LC_CTYPE="$LC_ALL"
        unset LC_ALL
    fi
    export LC_NUMERIC=C.UTF-8
```

SECURITY FIXES:

A fix for CVE-2018-25032 in the bundled zlib (memory corruption issue).

BUG FIXES:

Fixed a bug with --inplace + --sparse (and
a lack of --whole-file) where the destination file could
get reconstructed with bogus data. Since the bug can also be avoided by
using (the seemingly redundant) --no-W on the receiving
side, the latest rsync will now send --no-W to a remote receiver when this
option combination occurs. If your client rsync is not new enough to do
this for you (or if you're just paranoid), you can manually specify --no-W -M--no-W (when not using --whole-file) to make sure the
bug is avoided.
Fixed a bug with --mkpath if a single-file copy specifies
an existing destination dir with a non-existing destination filename.
Fixed --update -vv to output "is uptodate" instead of "is newer" messages
for files that are being skipped due to an identical modify time. (This was
a new output quirk in 3.2.3.)
When doing an append transfer, the sending side's file must not get shorter
or it is skipped. Fixes a crash that could occur when the size changes to 0
in the middle of the send negotiations.
When dealing with special files (see --specials) in an
alt-dest hierarchy, rsync now checks the non-permission mode bits to ensure
that the 2 special files are really the same before hard-linking them
together.
Fixed a bug where --delay-updates with stale partial data
could cause a file to fail to update.
Fixed a few places that would output an INFO message with
--info=NAME that should only have been output given
--verbose or --itemize-changes.
Avoid a weird failure if you run a local copy with a (useless)
--rsh option that contains a V in the command.
Fixed a long-standing compression bug where the compression level of the
first file transferred affected the level for all future files. Also, the
per-file compression skipping has apparently never worked, so it is now
documented as being ineffective.
Fixed a truncate error when a --write-devices copy wrote a file onto a
device that was shorter than the device.
Made --write-devices support both --checksum and --no-whole-file when
copying to a device.
Improved how the --stop-at, --stop-after,
and (the deprecated) --time-limit options check to see if
the allowed time is over, which should make rsync exit more consistently.
Tweak --progress to display "??:??:??" when the time-remaining value is so
large as to be meaningless.
Silence some chmod warnings about symlinks when it looks like we have a
function to set their permissions but they can't really be set.
Fixed a potential issue in git-set-file-times when handling commits with
high-bit characters in the description & when handling a description that
might mimic the git raw-commit deliniators. (See the support dir.)
The bundled systemd/rsync.service file now includes Restart=on-failure.

ENHANCEMENTS:

Use openssl's -verify_hostname option in the rsync-ssl script.
Added extra info to the "FILENAME exists" output of
--ignore-existing when --info=skip2 is
used. The skip message becomes "FILENAME exists (INFO)" where the INFO is
one of "type change", "sum change" (requires --checksum),
"file change" (based on the quick check), "attr change", or "uptodate".
Prior versions only supported --info=skip1.
Added the --fsync option (promoted from the patches repo).
Added the --copy-devices option. Compared to the
historical version from the rsync-patches repo, this version: properly
handles --checksum; fixes a truncation bug when doing an --inplace copy
onto a longer file; fixes several bugs in the --itemize output; and only
the sending side needs the enhanced rsync for the copy to work.
Reduced memory usage for an incremental transfer that has a bunch of small
directories.
The rsync daemon can now handle a client address with an implied "%scope"
suffix.
Added support for --atimes on macOS and fixed a bug where
it wouldn't work without --times.
Rsync can now update the xattrs on a read-only file when your user can
temporarily add user-write permission to the file. (It always worked for a
root transfer.)
Rsync can now work around an --inplace update of a file
that is being refused due to the Linux fs.protected_regular sysctl setting.
When --chown, --usermap, or
--groupmap is specified, rsync now makes sure that the
appropriate --owner and/or --group options
are enabled.
Added the --info=NONREG setting to control if rsync should
warn about non-regular files in the transfer. This is enabled by default
(keeping the behavior the same as before), so specifying --info=nonreg0
can be used to turn the warnings off.
An optional asm optimization for the rolling checksum from Shark64. Enable
it with ./configure --enable-roll-asm.
Using --debug=FILTER now outputs a caution message if a filter rule
has trailing whitespace.
Transformed rrsync into a python script with improvements:
- Security has been beefed up.
- The known rsync options were updated to include recent additions.
- Make rrsync reject --copy-links (-L),
  --copy-dirlinks (-k), &
  --keep-dirlinks (-K) by default to make it harder to
  exploit any out-of-subdir symlinks.
- A new rrsync option of -munge tells rrsync to always
  enable rsync's --munge-links option on the server side.
- A new rrsync option of -no-lock disables a new
  single-use locking idiom that is the default when -ro is
  not used (useful with -munge).
- A new rrsync option of -no-del disables all --remove*
  and --delete* rsync options on the server side.
- The log format has been tweaked slightly to add seconds to the timestamp
  and to output the command executed as a tuple (making the args clearer).
- An rrsync.1 manpage was added (in the support dir with rrsync).
Added options to the lsh script to facilitate rrsync testing. (See the
support dir.)
Transformed the atomic-rsync script into a python script and added the
ability to ignore one or more non-zero exit codes. By default, it now
ignores code 24, the file-vanished exit code. (See the support dir.)
Transformed the munge-symlinks script into python. (See the support dir.)
Improved the rsync-no-vanished script to not join stdout & stderr together.
(See the support dir.)
Work around a glibc bug where lchmod() breaks in a chroot w/o /proc mounted.
Try to support a client that sent a remote rsync a wacko stderr file handle
(such as an older File::RsyncP perl library used by BackupPC).
Lots of manpage improvements, including better HTML versions.

Give configure the --with-rrsync option if you want make install to
install the (now python3) rrsync script and its new manpage.
If the rrsync script is installed, its package should be changed to depend
on python3 and the (suggested but not mandatory) python3 braceexpand lib.
When creating a package from a non-release version (w/o a git checkout), the
packager can elect to create git-version.h and define RSYNC_GITVER to the
string they want --version to output. (The file is still auto-generated
using the output of git describe when building inside a non-shallow git
checkout, though.)
Renamed configure's --enable-simd option to --enable-roll-simd and added
the option --enable-roll-asm to use the new asm version of the code. Both
are x86_64/amd64 only.
Renamed configure's --enable-asm option to --enable-md5-asm to avoid
confusion with the asm option for the rolling checksum. It is also honored
even when openssl crypto is in use. This allows: normal MD4 & MD5, normal
MD4 + asm MD5, openssl MD4 & MD5, or openssl MD4 + asm MD5 depending on the
configure options selected.
Made SIMD & asm configure checks default to "no" on non-Linux hosts due to
various reports of problems on NetBSD & macOS hosts. These were also
tweaked to allow enabling the feature on a host_cpu of amd64 (was only
allowed on x86_64 before).
Fixed configure to not fail at the SIMD check when cross-compiling.
Improved the IPv6 determination in configure.
Compile the C files with -pedantic-errors (when possible) so that we will
get warned if a static initialization overflows in the future (among other
things).
When linking with an external zlib, rsync renames its read_buf() function
to read_buf_() to avoid a symbol clash on an unpatched zlib.
Added a SECURITY.md file.

Made it easier to write rsync tests that diff the output while also checking
the status code, and used the idiom to improve the existing tests. (See the
checkdiff and checkdiff2 idioms in the testsuite/*.test files.
The packaging scripts & related python lib got some minor enhancements.

INTERNAL

Use setenv() instead of putenv() when it is available.
Improve the logic in compat.c so that we don't need to try to remember to
sprinkle !local_server exceptions throughout the protocol logic.
One more C99 Flexible Array improvement (started in the last release) and
make use of the C99 %zd format string when printing size_t values (when
possible).
Use mallinfo2() instead of mallinfo(), when available.

NEWS for rsync 3.2.3 (6 Aug 2020)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

Fixed a bug in the xattr code that was freeing the wrong object when trying
to cleanup the xattr list.
Fixed a bug in the xattr code that was not leaving room for the "rsync."
prefix in some instances where it needed to be added.
Restored the ability to use --bwlimit=0 to specify no
bandwidth limit. (It was accidentally broken in 3.2.2.)
Fixed a bug when combining --delete-missing-args with
--no-implied-dirs & -R where rsync might
create the destination path of a missing arg. The code also avoids some
superfluous warnings for nested paths of removed args.
Fixed an issue where hard-linked devices could cause the rdev_major value to
get out of sync between the sender and the receiver, which could cause a
device to get created with the wrong major value in its major,minor pair.
Rsync now complains about a missing --temp-dir before
starting any file transfers.
A completely empty source arg is now a fatal error. This doesn't change
the handling of implied dot-dir args such as "localhost:" and such.

ENHANCEMENTS:

Allow --max-alloc=0 to specify no limit to the alloc sanity
check.
Allow --block-size=SIZE to specify the size using units
(e.g. "100K").
The name of the id-0 user & group are now sent to the receiver along with
the other user/group names in the transfer (instead of assuming that both
sides have the same id-0 names).
Added the --stop-after and --stop-at
options (with a --time-limit alias for --stop-after).
This is an enhanced version of the time-limit patch from the patches repo.
Added the name converter daemon parameter to make it
easier to convert user & group names inside a chrooted daemon module. This
is based on the nameconverter patch with some improvements, including a
tweak to the request protocol (so if you used this patch in the past, be
sure to update your converter script to use newlines instead of null chars).
Added --crtimes (-N) option for preserving the file's
create time (I believe that this is macOS only at the moment).
Added --mkpath option to tell rsync that it should create a
non-existing path component of the destination arg.
Added --stderr=errors|all|client to replace the
--msgs2stderr and --no-msgs2stderr options (which are still accepted).
The default use of stderr was changed to be --stderr=errors where all the
processes that have stderr available output directly to stderr, which should
help error messages get to the user more quickly, especially when doing a
push (which includes local copying). This also allows rsync to exit quickly
when a receiver failure occurs, since rsync doesn't need to try to keep the
connection alive long enough for the fatal error to go from the receiver to
the generator to the sender. The old default can be requested via
--stderr=client. Also changed is that a non-default stderr mode is
conveyed to the remote rsync (using the older option names) instead of
requiring the user to use --remote-option (-M) to tell
the remote rsync what to do.
Added the ability to specify "@netgroup" names to the hosts allow and hosts deny daemon
parameters. This is a finalized version of the netgroup-auth patch from the
patches repo.
Rsync can now hard-link symlinks on FreeBSD due to it making use of the
linkat() function when it is available.
Output file+line info on out-of-memory & overflow errors while also avoiding
the output of alternate build-dir path info that is not useful to the user.
Change configure to know that Cygwin supports Linux xattrs.
Improved the testsuite on FreeBSD & Cygwin.
Added some compatibility code for HPE NonStop platforms.
Improved the INSTALL.md info.
Added a few more suffixes to the default skip-compress list.
Improved configure's error handling to notify about several issues at once
instead of one by one (for the newest optional features).

INTERNAL:

Use a simpler overflow check idiom in a few spots.
Use a C99 Flexible Array for a trailing variable-size filename in a struct
(with a fallback to the old 1-char string kluge for older compilers).

NEWS for rsync 3.2.2 (4 Jul 2020)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

Avoid a crash when a daemon module enables transfer logging without
setting a log format value.
Fixed installing rsync-ssl script from an alternate build dir.
Fixed the updating of configure.sh from an alternate build dir.
Apple requires the asm function name to begin with an underscore.
Avoid a test failure in the daemon test when --atimes is disabled.

ENHANCEMENTS:

Allow the server side to restrict checksum & compression choices via the
same environment variables the client uses. The env vars can be divided
into "client list & server list" by the "&" char or the same list can
apply to both.
Simplify how the negotiation environment variables apply when interacting
with an older rsync and also when a list contains only invalid names.
Do not allow a negotiated checksum or compression choice of "none" unless
the user authorized it via an environment variable or command-line option.
Added the --max-alloc=SIZE option to be able to override the memory
allocator's sanity-check limit. It defaults to 1G (as before) but the error
message when exceeding it specifically mentions the new option so that you
can differentiate an out-of-memory error from a failure of this limit. It
also allows you to specify the value via the RSYNC_MAX_ALLOC environment
variable.
Add the "open atime" daemon parameter to allow a daemon to always enable or
disable the use of O_NOATIME (the default is to let the user control it).
The default systemd config was changed to remove the ProtectHome=on
setting since rsync is often used to serve files in /home and /root and this
seemed a bit too strict. Feel free to use systemctl edit rsync to add
that restriction (or maybe ProtectHome=read-only), if you like. See the
3.2.0 NEWS for the other restrictions that were added compared to 3.1.3.
The memory allocation functions now automatically check for a failure and
die when out of memory. This eliminated some caller-side check-and-die
code and added some missing sanity-checking of allocations.
Put optimizations into their own list in the --version output.
Improved the manpage a bit more.

Prepared the checksum code for an upcoming xxHash release that provides new
XXH3 (64-bit) & XXH128 (128-bit) checksum routines. These will not be
compiled into rsync until the xxhash v0.8.0 include files are installed on
the build host, and that release is a few weeks away at the time this was
written. So, if it's now the future and you have packaged and installed
xxhash-0.8.0-devel, a fresh rebuild of rsync 3.2.2 will give you the new
checksum routines. Just make sure that the new rsync package depends on
xxhash >= 0.8.0.

Moved the version number out of configure.ac into its own version.h file so
that we don't need to reconfigure just because the version number changes.
Moved the daemon parameter list into daemon-parm.txt so that an awk script
can create the interrelated structs and accessors that loadparm.c needs.

NEWS for rsync 3.2.1 (22 Jun 2020)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

Fixed a potential build issue with the MD5 assembly-language code by
removing some non-portable directives.
Use the preprocessor with the asm file to ensure that if the code is
unneeded, it doesn't get built.
Avoid the stack getting set to executable when including the asm code.
Some improvements in the SIMD configure testing to try to avoid build
issues, such as avoiding a clang++ core dump when -g is combined with
-O2. Note that clang++ is quite buggy in this area, and it does still
crash for some folks, so just use --disable-simd if you need to avoid
their buggy compiler (since the configure test is apparently not finding
all the compilers that will to crash and burn).
Fixed an issue in the md2man script when building from an alternate dir.
Disable --atimes on macOS (it apparently just ignores the atime change).

ENHANCEMENTS:

The use of --backup-dir=STR now implies --backup.
Added --zl=NUM as a short-hand for --compress-level=NUM.
Added --early-input=FILE option that allows the client to send some
data to a daemon's (optional) "early exec" script on its stdin.
Mention atimes in the capabilities list that --version outputs.
Mention either "default protect-args" or "optional protect-args" in the
--version capabilities depending on how rsync was configured.
Some info on optimizations is now elided from the --version capabilities
since they aren't really user-facing capabilities. You can still see the
info (plus the status of a couple extra optimizations) by repeating the
--version option (e.g. -VV).
Updated various URLs to be https instead of http.
Some documentation improvements.

If you had to use --disable-simd for 3.2.0, you might want to try removing
that and see if it will succeed or auto-disable. Some buggy clang++
compilers are still not auto disabled, though.
The MD5 asm code is now under its own configure flag (not shared with the
SIMD setting), so if you have any issues compiling it, re-run configure with
--disable-asm.
Merged the OLDNEWS.md file into NEWS.md.

NEWS for rsync 3.2.0 (19 Jun 2020)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

Avoid a potential out-of-bounds read in daemon mode if argc can be made to
become 0.
Fix the default list of skip-compress files for non-daemon transfers.
Fix xattr filter rules losing an 'x' attribute in a non-local transfer.
Avoid an error when a check for a potential fuzzy file happens to reference
a directory.
Make the atomic-rsync helper script have a more consistent error-exit.
Make sure that a signal handler's use of exit_cleanup() calls _exit()
instead of exit().
Various zlib fixes, including security fixes for CVE-2016-9843,
CVE-2016-9842, CVE-2016-9841, and CVE-2016-9840.
Fixed an issue with --remove-source-files not removing a source symlink
when combined with --copy-links.
Fixed a bug where the daemon would fail to write early fatal error messages
to the client, such as refused or unknown command-line options.
Fixed the block-size validation logic when dealing with older protocols.
Some rrsync fixes and enhancements to handle the latest options.
Fixed a problem with the --link-dest|--copy-dest code when --xattrs
was specified along with multiple alternate-destination directories (it
could possibly choose a bad file match while trying to find a better xattr
match).
Fixed a couple bugs in the handling of files with the --sparse option.
Fixed a bug in the writing of the batch.sh file (w/--write-batch) when the
source & destination args were not last on the command-line.
Avoid a hang when an overabundance of messages clogs up all the I/O buffers.
Fixed a mismatch in the RSYNC_PID values put into the environment of
pre-xfer exec and a post-xfer exec.
Fixed a crash in the --iconv code.
Fixed a rare crash in the popt_unalias() code.

ENHANCEMENTS:

The default systemd config was made stricter by default. For instance,
ProtectHome=on (which hides content in /root and /home/USER dirs),
ProtectSystem=full (which makes /usr, /boot, & /etc dirs read-only), and
PrivateDevices=on (which hides devices). You can override any of these
using the standard systemctl edit rsync and add one or more directives
under a [Service] heading (and restart the rsync service).
Various checksum enhancements, including the optional use of openssl's MD4 &
MD5 checksum algorithms, some x86-64 optimizations for the rolling checksum,
some x86-64 optimizations for the (non-openssl) MD5 checksum, the addition
of xxHash checksum support, and a negotiation heuristic that ensures that it
is easier to add new checksum algorithms in the future. The environment
variable RSYNC_CHECKSUM_LIST can be used to customize the preference order
of the negotiation, or use --checksum-choice (--cc) to force a choice.
Various compression enhancements, including the addition of zstd and lz4
compression algorithms and a negotiation heuristic that picks the best
compression option supported by both sides. The environment variable
RSYNC_COMPRESS_LIST can be used to customize the preference order of the
negotiation, or use --compress-choice (--zc) to force a choice.
Added a --debug=NSTR option that outputs details of the new negotiation
strings (for checksums and compression). The first level just outputs the
result of each negotiation on the client, level 2 outputs the values of the
strings that were sent to and received from the server, and level 3 outputs
all those values on the server side too (when the server was given the debug
option).
The --debug=OPTS command-line option is no longer auto-forwarded to the
remote rsync which allows for the client and server to have different levels
of debug specified. This also allows for newer debug options to be
specified, such as using --debug=NSTR to see the negotiated hash result,
without having the command fail if the server version is too old to handle
that debug item. Use -M--debug=OPTS to send the options to the remote side.
Added the --atimes option based on the long-standing patch (just with some
fixes that the patch has been needing).
Added --open-noatime option to open files using O_NOATIME.
Added the --write-devices option based on the long-standing patch.
Added openssl & preliminary gnutls support to the rsync-ssl script, which is
now installed by default. This was unified with the old stunnel-rsync
helper script to simplify packaging. Note that the script accepts the use
of --type=gnutls for gnutls testing, but does not look for gnutls-cli on
the path yet. The use of --type=gnutls will not work right until
gnutls-cli no longer drops data.
Rsync was enhanced to set the RSYNC_PORT environment variable when running
a daemon-over-rsh script. Its value is the user-specified port number (set
via --port or an rsync:// URL) or 0 if the user didn't override the port.
Added the proxy protocol daemon parameter that allows your rsyncd to know
the real remote IP when it is setup behind a proxy.
Added negated matching to the daemon's refuse options setting by using
match strings that start with a ! (such as !compress*). This lets you
refuse all options except for a particular approved list, for example. It
also lets rsync refuse certain options by default (such as write-devices)
while allowing the config to override that, as desired.
Added the early exec daemon parameter that runs a script before the
transfer parameters are known, allowing some early setup based on module
name.
Added status output in response to a signal (via both SIGINFO & SIGVTALRM).
Added --copy-as=USER option to give some extra security to root-run rsync
commands into/from untrusted directories (such as backups and restores).
When resuming the transfer of a file in the --partial-dir, rsync will now
update that partial file in-place instead of creating yet another tmp file
copy. This requires both sender & receiver to be at least v3.2.0.
Added support for RSYNC_SHELL & RSYNC_NO_XFER_EXEC environment variables
that affect the early, pre-xfer, and post-xfer exec rsync daemon parameters.
Optimize the --fuzzy --fuzzy heuristic to avoid the fuzzy directory scan
until all other basis-file options are exhausted (such as --link-dest).
Have the daemon log include the normal-exit sent/received stats when the
transfer exited with an error when possible (i.e. if it is the sender).
The daemon now locks its pid file (when configured to use one) so that it
will not fail to start when the file exists but no daemon is running.
Various manpage improvements, including some html representations (that
aren't installed by default).
Made -V the short option for --version and improved its information.
Pass the -4 or -6 option to the ssh command, making it easier to type
than --rsh='ssh -4' (or the -6 equivalent).
Added example config for rsyncd SSL proxy configs to rsyncd.conf.
More errors messages now mention if the error is coming from the sender or
the receiver.

Add installed bash script: /usr/bin/rsync-ssl
Add installed manpage: /usr/man/man1/rsync-ssl.1
Tweak auxiliary doc file names, such as: README.md, INSTALL.md, & NEWS.md.
The rsync-ssl script wants to run openssl or stunnel4, so consider adding a
dependency for one of those options (though it's probably fine to just let
it complain about being unable to find the program and let the user decide
if they want to install one or the other).
If you packaged rsync + rsync-ssl + rsync-ssl-daemon as separate packages,
the rsync-ssl package is now gone (rsync-ssl should be considered to be
mainstream now that Samba requires SSL for its rsync daemon).
Add build dependency for liblz4-dev, libxxhash-dev, libzstd-dev, and
libssl-dev. These development libraries will give rsync extra compression
algorithms, extra checksum algorithms, and allow use of openssl's crypto
lib for (potentially) faster MD4/MD5 checksums.
Add build dependency for g++ or clang++ on x86_64 systems to enable the
SIMD checksum optimizations.
Add build dependency for either python3-cmarkcfm or python3-commonmark
to allow for patching of manpages or building a git release. This is not
required for a release-tar build, since it comes with pre-built manpages.
Note that cmarkcfm is faster than commonmark, but they generate the same
data. The commonmark dependency is easiest to install since it's native
python, and can even be installed via pip3 install --user commonmark if
you want to just install it for the build user.
Remove yodl build dependency (if it was even listed before).

Silenced some annoying warnings about major() & minor() by improving an
autoconf include-file check.
Converted the manpages from yodl to markdown. They are now processed via a
simple python3 script using the cmarkgfm or commonmark library. This
should make it easier to package rsync, since yodl is rather obscure.
Improved some configure checks to work better with strict C99 compilers.
Some perl building/packaging scripts were recoded into awk and python3.
Some defines in byteorder.h were changed into static inline functions that
will help to ensure that the args don't get evaluated multiple times on
"careful alignment" hosts.
Some code typos were fixed (as pointed out by a Fossies run).

NEWS for rsync 3.1.3 (28 Jan 2018)

Changes in this version:

SECURITY FIXES:

Fixed a buffer overrun in the protocol's handling of xattr names and ensure
that the received name is null terminated.
Fix an issue with --protect-args where the user could specify the arg in the
protected-arg list and short-circuit some of the arg-sanitizing code.

BUG FIXES:

Don't output about a new backup dir without appropriate info verbosity.
Fixed some issues with the sort functions in the rsyncstats script (in the
support dir).
Added a way to specify daemon config lists (e.g. users, groups, etc) that
contain spaces (see auth users in the latest rsyncd.conf manpage).
If a backup fails (e.g. full disk) rsync exits with an error.
Fixed a problem with a doubled --fuzzy option combined with --link-dest.
Avoid invalid output in the summary if either the start or end time had an
error.
We don't allow a popt alias to affect the --daemon or --server options.
Fix daemon exclude code to disallow attribute changes in addition to
disallowing transfers.
Don't force nanoseconds to match if a non-transferred, non-checksummed file
only passed the quick-check w/o comparing nanoseconds.

ENHANCEMENTS:

Added the ability for rsync to compare nanosecond times in its file-check
comparisons, and added support nanosecond times on Mac OS X.
Added a short-option (-@) for --modify-window.
Added the --checksum-choice=NAME[,NAME] option to choose the checksum
algorithms.
Added hashing of xattr names (with using -X) to improve the handling of
files with large numbers of xattrs.
Added a way to filter xattr names using include/exclude/filter rules (see
the --xattrs option in the manpage for details).
Added daemon chroot|uid|gid to the daemon config (in addition to the old
chroot|uid|gid settings that affect the daemon's transfer process).
Added syslog tag to the daemon configuration.
Some manpage improvements.

Tweak the make output when yodl isn't around to create the manpages.
Changed an obsolete autoconf compile macro.
Support newer yodl versions when converting manpages.

NEWS for rsync 3.1.2 (21 Dec 2015)

Changes in this version:

SECURITY FIXES:

Make sure that all transferred files use only path names from inside the
transfer. This makes it impossible for a malicious sender to try to make the
receiver use an unsafe destination path for a transferred file, such as a
just-sent symlink.

BUG FIXES:

Change the checksum seed order in the per-block checksums. This prevents
someone from trying to create checksum blocks that match in sum but not
content.
Fixed a with the per-dir filter files (using -FF) that could trigger an
assert failure.
Only skip set_modtime() on a transferred file if the time is exactly
right.
Don't create an empty backup dir for a transferred file that doesn't exist
yet.
Fixed a bug where --link-dest and --xattrs could cause rsync to exit if
a filename had a matching dir of the same name in the alt-dest area.
Allow more than 32 group IDs per user in the daemon's gid=LIST config.
Fix the logging of %b & %c via --log-file (daemon logging was already
correct, as was --out-format='%b/%c').
Fix erroneous acceptance of --info=5 & --debug=5 (an empty flag name is
not valid).

ENHANCEMENTS:

Added (DRY RUN) info to the --debug=exit output line.
Use usleep() for our msleep() function if it is available.
Added a few extra long-option names to rrsync script, which will make
BackupPC happier.
Made configure choose to use Linux xattrs on NetBSD (rather than not
supporting xattrs).
Added -wo (write-only) option to rrsync support script.
Misc. manpage tweaks.

Fixed a bug with the Makefile's use of INSTALL_STRIP.
Improve a test in the suite that could get an erroneous timestamp error.
Tweaks for newer versions of git in the packaging tools.
Improved the m4 generation rules and some autoconf idioms.

NEWS for rsync 3.1.1 (22 Jun 2014)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

If the receiver gets bogus filenames from the sender (an unexpected leading
slash or a .. infix dir), exit with an error. This prevents a malicious
sender from trying to inject filenames that would affect an area outside the
destination directories.
Fixed a failure to remove the partial-transfer temp file when interrupted
(and rsync is not saving the partial files).
Changed the chown/group/xattr-set order to avoid losing some security-
related xattr info (that would get cleared by a chown).
Fixed a bug in the xattr-finding code that could make a non-root-run
receiver not able to find some xattr numbers.
Fixed a bug in the early daemon protocol where a timeout failed to be
honored (e.g. if the remote side fails to send us the initial protocol
greeting).
Fixed unintended inclusion of commas in file numbers in the daemon log.
We once again send the 'f' sub-flag (of -e) to the server side so it knows
that we can handle incremental-recursion directory errors properly in older
protocols.
Fixed an issue with too-aggressive keep-alive messages causing a problem for
older rsync versions early in the transfer.
Fixed an incorrect message about backup-directory-creation when using
--dry-run and the backup dir is not an absolute path.
Fixed a bug where a failed deletion and/or a failed sender-side removal
would not affect the exit code.
Fixed a bug that caused a failure when combining --delete-missing-args
with --xattrs and/or --acls.
Fixed a strange dir_depth assertion error that was caused by empty-dir
removals and/or duplicate files in the transfer.
Fixed a problem with --info=progress2's output stats where rsync would
only update the stats at the end of each file's transfer. It now uses the
data that is flowing for the current file, making the stats more accurate
and less jumpy.
Fixed an itemize bug that affected the combo of --link-dest, -X, and
-n.
Fixed a problem with delete messages not appearing in the log file when the
user didn't use --verbose.
Improve chunked xattr reading for OS X.
Removed an attempted hard-link xattr optimization that was causing a
transfer failure. This removal is flagged in the compatibility code, so if a
better fix can be discovered, we have a way to flip it on again.
Fixed a bug when the receiver is not configured to be able to hard link
symlimks/devices/special-file items but the sender sent some of these items
flagged as hard-linked.
We now generate a better error if the buffer overflows in do_mknod().
Fixed a problem reading more than 16 ACLs on some OSes.
Fixed the reading of the secrets file to avoid an infinite wait when the
username is missing.
Fixed a parsing problem in the --usermap/--groupmap options when using
MIN-MAX numbers.
Switched Cygwin back to using socketpair pipes to try to speed it up.
Added knowledge of a few new options to rrsync.

ENHANCEMENTS:

Tweaked the temp-file naming when --temp-dir=DIR is used: the temp-file
names will not get a '.' prepended.
Added support for a new-compression idiom that does not compress all the
matching data in a transfer. This can help rsync to use less cpu when a
transfer has a lot of matching data, and also makes rsync compatible with a
non-bundled zlib. See the --new-compress and --old-compress options in
the manpage.
Added the rsync-no-vanished shell script. (See the support dir.)
Made configure more prominently mention when we failed to find yodl (in case
the user wants to be able to generate manpages from *.yo files).
Have manpage mention how a daemon's max-verbosity setting affects info and
debug options. Also added more clarification on backslash removals for
excludes that contain wildcards.
Have configure check if for the attr lib (for getxattr) for those systems
that need to link against it explicitly.
Change the early dir-creation logic to only use that idiom in an
inc-recursive copy that is preserving directory times. e.g. using
--omit-dir-times will avoid these early directories being created.
Fix a bug in cmp_time() that would return a wrong result if the 2 times
differed by an amount greater than what a time_t can hold.

We now include an example systemd file (in packaging/systemd).
Tweaked configure to make sure that any intended use of the included popt
and/or zlib code is put early in the CFLAGS.

NEWS for rsync 3.1.0 (28 Sep 2013)

Changes in this version:

PROTOCOL NUMBER:

The protocol number was changed to 31.

OUTPUT CHANGES:

Output numbers in 3-digit groups by default (e.g. 1,234,567). See the
--human-readable option for a way to turn it off. See also the daemon's
log format parameter and related command-line options (including
--out-format) for a modifier that can be used to request digit-grouping or
human-readable output in log escapes. (Note that log output is unchanged by
default.)
The --list-only option is now affected by the --human-readable setting.
It will display digit groupings by default, and unit suffixes if higher
levels of readability are requested. Also, the column width for the size
output has increased from 11 to 14 characters when human readability is
enabled. Use --no-h to get the old-style output and column size.
The output of the --progress option has changed: the string xfer was
shortened to xfr, and the string to-check was shortened to to-chk,
both designed to make room for the (by default) wider display of file size
numbers without making the total line-length longer. Also, when incremental
recursion is enabled, the string ir-chk will be used instead of to-chk
up until the incremental-recursion scan is done, letting you know that the
value to check and the total value will still be increasing as new files are
found.
Enhanced the --stats output: 1) to mention how many files were created
(protocol >= 28), 2) to mention how many files were deleted (a new line for
protocol 31, but only output when --delete is in effect), and 3) to follow
the file-count, created-count, and deleted-count with a subcount list that
shows the counts by type. The wording of the transferred count has also
changed so that it is clearer that it is only a count of regular files.

BUG FIXES:

Fixed a bug in the iconv code when EINVAL or EILSEQ is returned with a full
output buffer.
Fixed some rare bugs in --iconv processing that might cause a multi-byte
character to get translated incorrectly.
Fixed a bogus vanished file error if some files were specified with ./
prefixes and others were not.
Fixed a bug in --sparse where an extra gap could get inserted after a
partial write.
Changed the way --progress overwrites its prior output in order to make it
nearly impossible for the progress to get overwritten by an error.
Improved the propagation of abnormal-exit error messages. This should help
the client side to receive errors from the server when it is exiting
abnormally, and should also avoid dying with an connection unexpectedly closed exit when the closed connection is really expected.
The sender now checks each file it plans to remove to ensure that it hasn't
changed from the first stat's info. This helps to avoid losing file data
when the user is not using the option in a safe manner.
Fixed a data-duplication bug in the compress option that made compression
less efficient. This improves protocol 31 onward, while behaving in a
compatible (buggy) manner with older rsync protocols.
When creating a temp-file, rsync is now a bit smarter about it dot-char
choices, which can fix a problem on OS X with names that start with ...
Rsync now sets a cleanup flag for --inplace and --append transfers that
will flush the write buffer if the transfer aborts. This ensures that more
received data gets written out to the disk on an aborted transfer (which is
quite helpful on a slow, flaky connection).
The reads that map_ptr() now does are aligned on 1K boundaries. This helps
some filesystems and/or files that don't like unaligned reads.
Fix an issue in the msleep() function if time jumps backwards.
Fix daemon-server module-name splitting bug where an arg would get split
even if --protect-args was used.

ENHANCEMENTS:

Added the --remote-option=OPT (-M OPT) command-line option that is
useful for things like sending a remote --log-file=FILE or --fake-super
option.
Added the --info=FLAGS and --debug=FLAGS options to allow finer-grained
control over what is output. Added an extra type of --progress output
using --info=progress2.
The --msgs2stderr option can help with debugging rsync by allowing the
debug messages to get output to stderr rather than travel via the socket
protocol.
Added the --delete-missing-args and --ignore-missing-args options to
either delete or ignore user-specified files on the receiver that are
missing on the sender (normally the absence of user-specified files
generates an error).
Added a T (terabyte) category to the --human-readable size suffixes.
Added the --usermap/--groupmap/--chown options for manipulating file
ownership during the copy.
Added the %C escape to the log-output handling, which will output the MD5
checksum of any transferred file, or all files if --checksum was specified
(when protocol 30 or above is in effect).
Added the reverse lookup parameter to the rsync daemon config file to
allow reverse-DNS lookups to be disabled.
Added a forward-DNS lookup for the daemon's hosts allow/deny config. Can be
disabled via forward lookup parameter (defaults to enabled).
Added a way for more than one group to be specified in the daemon's config
file, including a way to specify that you want all of the specified user's
groups without having to name them. Also changed the daemon to complain
about an inability to set explicitly-specified uid/gid values, even when not
run by a super-user.
The daemon now tries to send the user the error messages from the pre-xfer
exec script when it fails.
Improved the use of alt-dest options into an existing hierarchy of files: If
a match is found in an alt-dir, it takes precedence over an existing file.
(We'll need to wait for a future version before attribute-changes on
otherwise unchanged files are safe when using an existing hierarchy.)
Added per-user authorization options and group-authorization support to the
daemon's auth users parameter.
Added a way to reference environment variables in a daemon's config file
(using %VAR% references).
When replacing a non-dir with a symlink/hard-link/device/special-file, the
update should now be done in an atomic manner.
Avoid re-sending xattr info for hard-linked files w/the same xattrs
(protocol 31).
The backup code was improved to use better logic maintaining the backup
directory hierarchy. Also, when a file is being backed up, rsync tries to
hard-link it into place so that the upcoming replacement of the destination
file will be atomic (for the normal, non-inplace logic).
Added the ability to synchronize nanosecond modified times.
Added a few more default suffixes for the dont compress settings.
Added the checking of the RSYNC_PROTECT_ARGS environment variable to allow
the default for the --protect-args command-line option to be overridden.
Added the --preallocate command-line option.
Allow --password-file=- to read the password from stdin (filename -).
Rsync now comes packaged with an rsync-ssl helper script that can be used to
contact a remote rsync daemon using a piped-stunnel command. It also
includes an stunnel config file to run the server side to support ssl daemon
connections. See the packaging/lsb/rsync.spec file for one way to package
the resulting files. (Suggestions for how to make this even easier to
install & use are welcomed.)
Improved the speed of some --inplace updates when there are lots of
identical checksum blocks that end up being unusable.
Added the --outbuf=N|L|B option for choosing the output buffering.
Repeating the --fuzzy option now causes the code to look for fuzzy matches
inside alt-dest directories too.
The --chmod option now supports numeric modes, e.g. --chmod=644,D755
Added some Solaris xattr code.
Made an rsync daemon (the listening process) exit with a 0 status when it
was signaled to die. This helps launchd.
Improved the RSYNC_* environment variables for the pre-xfer exec script:
when a daemon is sent multiple request args, they are now joined into a
single return value (separated by spaces) so that the RSYNC_REQUEST
environment variable is accurate for any pre-xfer exec. The values in
RSYNC_ARG# vars are no longer truncated at the . arg (prior to the
request dirs/files), so that all the requested values are also listed
(separately) in RSYNC_ARG# variables.

EXTRAS:

Added an instant-rsyncd script to the support directory, which makes it
easy to configure a simple rsync daemon in the current directory.
Added the mapfrom and mapto scripts to the support directory, which
makes it easier to do user/group mapping in a local transfer based on
passwd/group files from another machine.
There's a new, improved version of the lsh script in the support dir: it's
written in perl and supports -u without resorting to using sudo (when run
as root). The old shell version is now named lsh.sh.
There is a helper script named rsync-slash-strip in the support directory
for anyone that wants to change the way rsync handles args with trailing
slashes. (e.g. arg/ would get stripped to arg while arg/. would turn into
arg/).

INTERNAL:

The I/O code was rewritten to be simpler and do bigger buffered reads over
the socket. The I/O between the receiver and the generator was changed to be
standard multiplexed-I/O (like that over the socket).
The sender tries to use any dead time while the generator is looking for
files to transfer in order to do sender-side directory scanning in a more
parallel manner.
A daemon can now inform a client about a daemon-configured timeout value so
that the client can assist in the keep-alive activity (protocol 31).
The filter code received some refactoring to make it more extendable, to
read better, and do better sanity checking.
Really big numbers are now output using our own big-num routine rather than
casting them to a double and using a %.0f conversion.
The pool_alloc library has received some minor improvements in alignment
handling.
Added init_stat_x() function to avoid duplication of acl/xattr init code.
The included zlib was upgraded from 1.2.3 to 1.2.8.
Rsync can now be compiled to use an unmodified zlib library instead of the
tweaked one that is included with rsync. This will eventually become the
default, at which point we'll start the countdown to removing the included
zlib. Until then, feel free to configure using:

./configure --with-included-zlib=no

Added more conditional debug output.
Fixed some build issues for Android and Minix.

NEWS for rsync 3.0.9 (23 Sep 2011)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

Fix a crash bug in checksum scanning when --inplace is used.
Fix a hang if a hard-linked file cannot be opened by the sender (e.g. if it
has no read permission).
Fix preservation of a symlink's system xattrs (e.g. selinux) on Linux.
Fix a memory leak in the xattr code.
Fixed a bug with --delete-excluded when a filter merge file has a rule
that specifies a receiver-only side restriction.
Fix a bug with the modifying of unwritable directories.
Fix --fake-super's interaction with --link-dest same-file comparisons.
Fix the updating of the curr_dir buffer to avoid a duplicate slash.
Fix the directory permissions on an implied dot-dir when using --relative
(e.g. /outside/path/././send/path).
Fixed some too-long sleeping instances when using --bwlimit.
Fixed when symlink ownership difference-checking gets compiled into
unchanged_attrs().
Improved the socket-error reporting when multiple protocols fail.
Fixed a case where a socket error could reference just-freed memory.
Failing to use a password file that was specified on the command-line is now
a fatal error.
Fix the non-root updating of directories that don't have the read and/or
execute permission.
Make daemon-excluded file errors more error-like.
Fix a compilation issue on older C compilers (due to a misplaced var
declaration).
Make configure avoid finding socketpair on Cygwin.
Avoid trying to reference SO_BROADCAST if the OS doesn't support it.
Fix some issues with the post-processing of the manpages.
Fixed the user home-dir handling in the lsh script. (See the support dir.)
Some minor manpage improvements.

NEWS for rsync 3.0.8 (26 Mar 2011)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

Fixed two buffer-overflow issues: one where a directory path that is exactly
MAXPATHLEN was not handled correctly, and one handling a --backup-dir that
is extra extra large.
Fixed a data-corruption issue when preserving hard-links without preserving
file ownership, and doing deletions either before or during the transfer
(CVE-2011-1097). This fixes some assert errors in the hard-linking code, and
some potential failed checksums (via -c) that should have matched.
Fixed a potential crash when an rsync daemon has a filter/exclude list and
the transfer is using ACLs or xattrs.
Fixed a hang if a really large file is being processed by an rsync that
can't handle 64-bit numbers. Rsync will now complain about the file being
too big and skip it.
For devices and special files, we now avoid gathering useless ACL and/or
xattr information for files that aren't being copied. (The un-copied files
are still put into the file list, but there's no need to gather data that is
not going to be used.) This ensures that if the user uses --no-D, that
rsync can't possibly complain about being unable to gather extended
information from special files that are in the file list (but not in the
transfer).
Properly handle requesting remote filenames that start with a dash. This
avoids a potential error where a filename could be interpreted as a (usually
invalid) option.
Fixed a bug in the comparing of upper-case letters in file suffixes for
--skip-compress.
If an rsync daemon has a module configured without a path setting, rsync
will now disallow access to that module.
If the destination arg is an empty string, it will be treated as a reference
to the current directory (as 2.x used to do).
If rsync was compiled with a newer time-setting function (such as lutimes),
rsync will fall-back to an older function (such as utimes) on a system where
the newer function is not around. This helps to make the rsync binary more
portable in mixed-OS-release situations.
Fixed a batch-file writing bug that would not write out the full set of
compatibility flags that the transfer was using. This fixes a potential
protocol problem for a batch file that contains a sender-side I/O error: it
would have been sent in a way that the batch-reader wasn't expecting.
Some improvements to the hard-linking code to ensure that device-number
hashing is working right, and to supply more information if the hard-link
code fails.
The --inplace code was improved to not search for an impossible checksum
position. The quadruple-verbose chunk[N] message will now mention when an
inplace chunk was handled by a seek rather than a read+write.
Improved ACL mask handling, e.g. for Solaris.
Fixed a bug that prevented --numeric-ids from disabling the translation of
user/group IDs for ACLs.
Fixed an issue where an xattr and/or ACL transfer that used an alt-dest
option (e.g. --link-dest) could output an error trying to itemize the
changes against the alt-dest directory's xattr/ACL info but was instead
trying to access the not-yet-existing new destination directory.
Improved xattr system-error messages to mention the full path to the file.
The --link-dest checking for identical symlinks now avoids considering
attribute differences that cannot be changed on the receiver.
Avoid trying to read/write xattrs on certain file types for certain OSes.
Improved configure to set NO_SYMLINK_XATTRS, NO_DEVICE_XATTRS, and/or
NO_SPECIAL_XATTRS defines in config.h.
Improved the unsafe-symlink errors messages.
Fixed a bug setting xattrs on new files that aren't user writable.
Avoid re-setting xattrs on a hard-linked file w/the same xattrs.
Fixed a bug with --fake-super when copying files and dirs that aren't user
writable.
Fixed a bug where a sparse file could have its last sparse block turned into
a real block when rsync sets the file size (requires ftruncate).
If a temp-file name is too long, rsync now avoids truncating the name in the
middle of adjacent high-bit characters. This prevents a potential filename
error if the filesystem doesn't allow a name to contain an invalid
multi-byte sequence.
If a muli-protocol socket connection fails (i.e., when contacting a daemon),
we now report all the failures, not just the last one. This avoids losing a
relevant error (e.g. an IPv4 connection-refused error) that happened before
the final error (e.g. an IPv6 protocol-not-supported error).
Generate a transfer error if we try to call chown with a -1 for a uid or a
gid (which is not settable).
Fixed the working of --force when used with --one-file-system.
Fix the popt arg parsing so that an option that doesn't take an arg will
reject an attempt to supply one (can configure --with-included-popt if
your system's popt library doesn't yet have this fix).
A couple minor option tweaks to the rrsync script, and also some regex
changes that make vim highlighting happier. (See the support dir.)
Fixed some issues in the mnt-excl script. (See the support dir.)
Various manpage improvements.

ENHANCEMENTS:

Added .hg/ to the default cvs excludes (see -C & --cvs-exclude).

Use lchmod() whenever it is available (not just on symlinks).
A couple fixes to the socketpair_tcp() routine.
Updated the helper scripts in the packaging subdirectory.
Renamed configure.in to configure.ac.
Fixed configure's checking for iconv routines for newer OS X versions.
Fixed the testsuite/xattrs.test script on OS X.

NEWS for rsync 3.0.7 (31 Dec 2009)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

Fixed a bogus free when using --xattrs with --backup.
Avoid an error when --dry-run was trying to stat a prior hard-link file
that hasn't really been created.
Fixed a problem with --compress (-z) where the receiving side could
return the error "inflate (token) returned -5".
Fixed a bug where --delete-during could delete in a directory before it
noticed that the sending side sent an I/O error for that directory (both
sides of the transfer must be at least 3.0.7).
Improved --skip-compress's error handling of bad character-sets and got
rid of a lingering debug fprintf().
Fixed the daemon's conveyance of io_error value from the sender.
An rsync daemon use seteuid() (when available) if it used setuid().
Get the permissions right on a --fake-super transferred directory that
needs more owner permissions to emulate root behavior.
An absolute-path filter rule (i.e. with a '/' modifier) no longer loses its
modifier when sending the filter rules to the remote rsync.
Improved the "--delete does not work without -r or -d" message.
Improved rsync's handling of --timeout to avoid a weird timeout case where
the sender could timeout even though it has recently written data to the
socket (but hasn't read data recently, due to the writing).
Some misc manpage improvements.
Fixed the chmod-temp-dir testsuite on a system without /var/tmp.
Make sure that a timeout specified in the daemon's config is used as a
maximum timeout value when the user also specifies a timeout.
Improved the error-exit reporting when rsync gets an error trying to cleanup
after an error: the initial error is reported.
Improved configure's detection of IPv6 for Solaris and Cygwin.
The AIX sysacls routines will now return ENOSYS if ENOTSUP is missing.
Made our (only used if missing) getaddrinfo() routine use inet_pton()
(which we also provide) instead of inet_aton().
The exit-related debug messages now mention the program's role so it is
clear who output what message.

Got rid of type-punned compiler warnings output by newer gcc versions.
The Makefile now ensures that proto.h will be rebuilt if config.h changes.
The testsuite no longer uses id -u, so it works better on Solaris.

NEWS for rsync 3.0.6 (8 May 2009)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

Fixed a --read-batch hang when rsync is reading a batch file that was
created from an incremental-recursion transfer.
Fixed the daemon's socket code to handle the simultaneous arrival of
multiple connections.
Fix --safe-links/--copy-unsafe-links to properly handle symlinks that
have consecutive slashes in the value.
Fixed the parsing of an [IPv6_LITERAL_ADDR] when a USER@ is prefixed.
The sender now skips a (bogus) symlink that has a 0-length value, which
avoids a transfer error in the receiver.
Fixed a case where the sender could die with a tag-0 error if there was an
I/O during the sending of the file list.
Fixed the rrsync script to avoid a server-side problem when -e is at the
start of the short options.
Fixed a problem where a vanished directory could turn into an exit code 23
instead of the proper exit code 24.
Fixed the --iconv conversion of symlinks when doing a local copy.
Fixed a problem where --one-file-system was not stopping deletions on the
receiving side when a mount-point directory did not match a directory in the
transfer.
Fixed the dropping of an ACL mask when no named ACL values were present.
Fixed an ACL/xattr corruption issue where the --backup option could cause
rsync to associate the wrong ACL/xattr information with received files.
Fixed the use of --xattrs with --only-write-batch.
Fixed the use of --dry-run with --read-batch.
Fixed configure's erroneous use of target.
Fixed configure's --disable-debug option.
Fixed a run-time issue for systems that can't find iconv_open() by adding
the --disable-iconv-open configure option.
Complain and die if the user tries to combine --remove-source-files (or
the deprecated --remove-sent-files) with --read-batch.
Fixed an failure transferring special files from Solaris to Linux.

NEWS for rsync 3.0.5 (28 Dec 2008)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

Initialize xattr data in a couple spots in the hlink code, which avoids a
crash when the xattr pointer's memory happens to start out non-zero. Also
fixed the itemizing of an alt-dest file's xattrs when hard-linking.
Don't send a bogus - option to an older server if there were no short
options specified.
Fixed skipping of unneeded updates in a batch file when incremental
recursion is active. Added a test for this. Made batch-mode handle redo
files properly (and without hanging).
Fix the %P logfile escape when the daemon logs from inside a chroot.
Fixed the use of -s (--protect-args) when used with a remote source or
destination that had an empty path (e.g. host:). Also fixed a problem when
-s was used when accessing a daemon via a remote-shell.
Fixed the use of a dot-dir path (e.g. foo/./bar) inside a --files-from
file when the root of the transfer isn't the current directory.
Fixed a bug with -K --delete removing symlinks to directories when
incremental recursion is active.
Fixed a hard to trigger hang when using --remove-source-files.
Got rid of an annoying delay when accessing a daemon via a remote-shell.
Properly ignore (superfluous) source args on a --read-batch command.
Improved the manpage's description of the * wildcard to remove the
confusing non-empty qualifier.
Fixed reverse lookups in the compatibility-library version of getnameinfo().
Fixed a bug when using --sparse on a sparse file that has over 2GB of
consecutive sparse data.
Avoid a hang when using at least 3 --verbose options on a transfer with a
client sender (which includes local copying).
Fixed a problem with --delete-delay reporting an error when it was ready
to remove a directory that was now gone.
Got rid of a bunch of warn_unused_result compiler warnings.
If an ftruncate() on a received file fails, it now causes a partial-
transfer warning.
Allow a path with a leading // to be preserved (CYGWIN only).

ENHANCEMENTS:

Made the atomic-rsync script able to perform a fully atomic update of the
copied hierarchy when the destination is setup using a particular symlink
idiom. (See the support dir.)

NEWS for rsync 3.0.4 (6 Sep 2008)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

Fixed a bug in the hard-linking code where it would sometimes try to
allocate 0 bytes of memory (which fails on some OSes, such as AIX).
Fixed the hard-linking of files from a device that has a device number of 0
(which seems to be a common device number on NetBSD).
Fixed the handling of a --partial-dir that cannot be created. This
particularly impacts the --delay-updates option (since the files cannot be
delayed without a partial-dir), and was potentially destructive if the
--remove-source-files was also specified.
Fixed a couple issues in the --fake-super handling of xattrs when the
destination files have root-level attributes (e.g. selinux values) that a
non-root copy can't affect.
Improved the keep-alive check in the generator to fire consistently in
incremental-recursion mode when --timeout is enabled.
The --iconv option now converts the content of a symlink too, instead of
leaving it in the wrong character-set (requires 3.0.4 on both sides of the
transfer).
When using --iconv, if a filename fails to convert on the receiving side,
this no longer makes deletions in the root-dir of the transfer fail silently
(the user now gets a warning about deletions being disabled due to IO error
as long as --ignore-errors was not specified).
When using --iconv, if a server-side receiver can't convert a filename,
the error message sent back to the client no longer mangles the name with
the wrong charset conversion.
Fixed a potential alignment issue in the IRIX ACL code when allocating the
initial struct acl object. Also, cast mallocs to avoid warnings.
Changed some errors that were going to stdout to go to stderr.
Made human_num() and human_dnum() able to output a negative number
(rather than outputting a cryptic string of punctuation).

ENHANCEMENTS:

Rsync will avoid sending an -e option to the server if an older protocol
is requested (and thus the option would not be useful). This lets the user
specify the --protocol=29 option to access an overly-restrictive server
that is rejecting the protocol-30 use of -e to the server.
Improved the message output for an RERR_PARTIAL exit.

The Makefile will not halt for just a timestamp change on the Makefile or
the configure files, only for actual changes in content.
Changed some commands in the testsuite's xattrs.test that called rsync
instead of $RSYNC.
Enhanced the release scripts to be able to handle a branch release and to do
even more consistency checks on the files.

NEWS for rsync 3.0.3 (29 Jun 2008)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

Fixed a wildcard matching problem in the daemon when a module has use chroot enabled.
Fixed a crash bug in the hard-link code.
Fixed the sending of xattr directory information when the code finds a
--link-dest or --copy-dest directory with unchanged xattrs -- the
destination directory now gets these unchanged xattrs properly applied.
Fixed an xattr-sending glitch that could cause an Internal abbrev error.
Fixed the combination of --xattrs and --backup.
The generator no longer allows a '.' dir to be excluded by a daemon-exclude
rule.
Fixed deletion handling when copying a single, empty directory (with no
files) to a differently named, non-existent directory.
Fixed the conversion of spaces into dashes in the %M log escape.
Fixed several places in the code that were not returning the right errno
when a function failed.
Fixed the backing up of a device or special file into a backup dir.
Moved the setting of the socket options prior to the connect().
If rsync exits in the middle of a --progress output, it now outputs a
newline to help prevent the progress line from being overwritten.
Fixed a problem with how a destination path with a trailing slash or a
trailing dot-dir was compared against the daemon excludes.
Fixed the sending of large (size > 16GB) files when talking to an older
rsync (protocols < 30): we now use a compatible block size limit.
If a file's length is so huge that we overflow a checksum buffer count (i.e.
several hundred TB), warn the user and avoid sending an invalid checksum
struct over the wire.
If a source arg is excluded, --relative no longer adds the excluded arg's
implied dirs to the transfer. This fix also made the exclude check happen in
the better place in the sending code.
Use the overflow_exit() function for overflows, not out_of_memory().
Improved the code to better handle a system that has only 32-bit file
offsets.

ENHANCEMENTS:

The rsyncd.conf manpage now consistently refers to the parameters in the
daemon config file as parameters.
The description of the --inplace option was improved.

EXTRAS:

Added a new script in the support directory, deny-rsync, which allows an
admin to (temporarily) replace the rsync command with a script that sends an
error message to the remote client via the rsync protocol.

Fixed a testcase failure if the tests are run as root and made some
compatibility improvements.
Improved the daemon tests, including checking module comments, the listing
of files, and the ensuring that daemon excludes can't affect a dot-dir arg.
Improved some build rules for those that build in a separate directory from
the source, including better install rules for the manpages, and the fixing
of a proto.h-tstamp rule that could make the binaries get rebuild without
cause.
Improved the testsuite to work around a problem with some utilities (e.g.
cp -p & touch -r) rounding sub-second timestamps.
Ensure that the early patches don't cause any generated-file hunks to
bleed-over into patches that follow.

NEWS for rsync 3.0.2 (8 Apr 2008)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

Fixed a potential buffer overflow in the xattr code.

ENHANCEMENTS:

None.

The RPM spec file was improved to install more useful files.
A few developer-oriented scripts were moved from the support dir to the
packaging dir.

NEWS for rsync 3.0.1 (3 Apr 2008)

Changes in this version:

NOTABLE CHANGES IN BEHAVIOR:

Added the 'c'-flag to the itemizing of non-regular files so that the
itemized output doesn't get hidden if there were no attribute changes, and
also so that the itemizing of a --copy-links run will distinguish between
copying an identical non-regular file and the creation of a revised version
with a new value (e.g. a changed symlink referent, a new device number,
etc.).

BUG FIXES:

Fixed a crash bug when a single-use rsync daemon (via remote shell) was run
without specifying a --config=FILE option.
Fixed a crash when backing up a directory that has a default ACL.
Fixed a bug in the handling of xattr values that could cause rsync to not
think that a file's extended attributes are up-to-date.
Fixed the working of --fake-super with --link-dest and --xattrs.
Fixed a hang when combining --dry-run with --remove-source-files.
Fixed a bug with --iconv's handling of files that cannot be converted: a
failed name can no longer cause a transfer failure.
Fixed the building of the rounding.h file on systems that need custom
CPPFLAGS to be used. Also improved the error reporting if the building of
rounding.h fails.
Fixed the use of the --protect-args (-s) option when talking to a
daemon.
Fixed the --ignore-existing option's protection of files on the receiver
that are non-regular files on the sender (e.g. if a symlink or a dir on the
sender is trying to replace a file on the receiver). The reverse protection
(protecting a dir/symlink/device from being replaced by a file) was already
working.
Fixed an assert failure if --hard-links is combined with an option that
can skip a file in a set of hard-linked files (i.e. --ignore-existing,
--append, etc.), without skipping all the files in the set.
Avoid setting the modify time on a directory that already has the right
modify time set. This avoids tweaking the dir's ctime.
Improved the daemon-exclude handling to do a better job of applying the
exclude rules to path entries. It also sends the user an error just as if
the files were actually missing (instead of silently ignoring the user's
args), and avoids sending the user the filter-action messages for these
non-user-initiated rules.
Fixed some glitches with the dry-run code's missing-directory handling,
including a problem when combined with --fuzzy.
Fixed some glitches with the skipped-directory handling.
Fixed the 'T'-flag itemizing of symlinks when --time isn't preserved.
Fixed a glitch in the itemizing of permissions with the -E option.
The --append option's restricting of transfers to those that add data no
longer prevents the updating of non-content changes to otherwise up-to-date
files (i.e. those with the same content but differing permissions,
ownership, xattrs, etc.).
Don't allow --fake-super to be specified with -XX (double --xattrs)
because the options conflict. If a daemon has fake super enabled, it
automatically downgrades a -XX request to -X.
Fixed a couple bugs in the parsing of daemon-config excludes that could make
a floating exclude rule get treated as matching an absolute path.
A daemon doesn't try to auto-refuse the iconv option if iconv-support
wasn't compiled in to the daemon (avoiding a warning in the logs).
Fixed the inclusion of per-dir merge files from implied dirs.
Fixed the rrsync script to work with the latest options that rsync sends,
including its flag-specifying use of -e to the server. (See the support
dir.)

ENHANCEMENTS:

Added the --old-dirs (--old-d) option to make it easier for a user to
ask for file-listings with older rsync versions (this is easier than having
to type -r --exclude='/*/*' manually).
When getting an error while asking an older rsync daemon for a file listing,
rsync will try to notice if the error is a rejection of the --dirs (-d)
option and let the user know how to work around the issue.
Added a few more --no-OPTION overrides.
Improved the documentation of the --append option.
Improved the documentation of the filter/exclude/include daemon parameters.

INTERNAL:

Fixed a couple minor bugs in the included popt library (ones which I sent to
the official popt project for inclusion in the 1.14 release).
Fixed a stat() call that should have been do_stat() so that the proper
normal/64-bit stat() function gets called. (Was in an area that should not
have caused problems, though.)
Changed the file-glob code to do a directory scan without using the glob
and glob.h. This lets us do the globbing with less memory churn, and also
avoid adding daemon-excluded items to the returned args.

The configure script tries to get the user's compiler to not warn about
unused function parameters if the build is not including one or more of the
ACL/xattrs/iconv features.
The configure script now has better checks for figuring out if the included
popt code should be used or not.
Fixed two testsuite glitches: avoid a failure if someone's cd command
outputs the current directory when cd-ing to a relative path, and made the
itemized test query how rsync was built to determine if it should expect
hard-linked symlinks or not.
Updated the testsuite to verify that various bug fixes remain fixed.
The RPM spec file was updated to have: (1) comments for how to use the
rsync-patch tar file, and (2) an /etc/xinetd.d/rsync file.
Updated the build scripts to work with a revised FTP directory structure.

NEWS for rsync 3.0.0 (1 Mar 2008)

Changes in this version:

PROTOCOL NUMBER:

The protocol number was changed to 30.

NOTABLE CHANGES IN BEHAVIOR:

The handling of implied directories when using --relative has changed to
send them as directories (e.g. no implied dir is ever sent as a symlink).
This avoids unexpected behavior and should not adversely affect most people.
If you're one of those rare individuals who relied upon having an implied
dir be duplicated as a symlink, you should specify the transfer of the
symlink and the transfer of the referent directory as separate args. (See
also --keep-dirlinks and --no-implied-dirs.) Also, exclude rules no
longer have a partial effect on implied dirs.
Requesting a remote file-listing without specifying -r (--recursive) now
sends the -d (--dirs) option to the remote rsync rather than sending
-r along with an extra exclude of /*/*. If the remote rsync does not
understand the -d option (i.e. it is 2.6.3 or older), you will need to
either turn off -d (--no-d), or specify -r --exclude='/*/*' manually.
In --dry-run mode, the last line of the verbose summary text is output
with a "(DRY RUN)" suffix to help remind you that no updates were made.
Similarly, --only-write-batch outputs (BATCH ONLY).
A writable rsync daemon with use chroot disabled now defaults to a
symlink-munging behavior designed to make symlinks safer while also allowing
absolute symlinks to be stored and retrieved. This also has the effect of
making symlinks unusable while they're in the daemon's hierarchy. See the
daemon's munge symlinks parameter for details.
Starting up an extra copy of an rsync daemon will not clobber the pidfile
for the running daemon -- if the pidfile exists, the new daemon will exit
with an error. This means that your wrapper script that starts the rsync
daemon should be made to handle lock-breaking (if you want any automatic
breaking of locks to be done).

BUG FIXES:

A daemon with use chroot = no and excluded items listed in the daemon
config file now properly checks an absolute-path arg specified for these
options: --compare-dest, --link-dest, --copy-dest, --partial-dir,
--backup-dir, --temp-dir, and --files-from.
A daemon can now be told to disable all user- and group-name translation on
a per-module basis. This avoids a potential problem with a writable daemon
module that has use chroot enabled -- if precautions weren't taken, a user
could try to add a missing library and get rsync to use it. This makes rsync
safer by default, and more configurable when id-translation is not desired.
See the daemon's numeric ids parameter for full details.
A chroot daemon can now indicate which part of its path should affect the
chroot call, and which part should become an inside-chroot path for the
module. This allows you to have outside-the-transfer paths (such as for
libraries) even when you enable chroot protection. The idiom used in the
rsyncd.conf file is: path = /chroot/dirs/./dirs/inside
If a file's data arrived successfully on the receiving side but the rename
of the temporary file to the destination file failed AND the
--remove-source-files (or the deprecated --remove-sent-files) option was
specified, rsync no longer erroneously removes the associated source file.
Fixed the output of -ii when combined with one of the --*-dest options:
it now itemizes all the items, not just the changed ones.
Made the output of all file types consistent when using a --*-dest option.
Prior versions would output too many creation events for matching items.
The code that waits for a child pid now handles being interrupted by a
signal. This fixes a problem with the pre-xfer exec function not being able
to get the exit status from the script.
A negated filter rule (i.e. with a '!' modifier) no longer loses the
negation when sending the filter rules to the remote rsync.
Fixed a problem with the --out-format (aka --log-format) option %f: it
no longer outputs superfluous directory info for a non-daemon rsync.
Fixed a problem with -vv (double --verbose) and --stats when pushing
files (which includes local copies). Version 2.6.9 would complete the copy,
but exit with an error when the receiver output its memory stats.
If --password-file is used on a non-daemon transfer, rsync now complains
and exits. This should help users figure out that they can't use this option
to control a remote shell's password prompt.
Make sure that directory permissions of a newly-created destination
directory are handled right when --perms is left off.
The itemized output of a newly-created destination directory is now output
as a creation event, not a change event.
Improved --hard-link so that more corner cases are handled correctly when
combined with options such as --link-dest and/or --ignore-existing.
The --append option no longer updates a file that has the same size.
Fixed a bug when combining --backup and --backup-dir with --inplace:
any missing backup directories are now created.
Fixed a bug when using --backup and --inplace with --whole-file or
--read-batch: backup files are actually created now.
The daemon pidfile is checked and created sooner in the startup sequence.
If a daemon module's path value is not an absolute pathname, the code now
makes it absolute internally (making it work properly).
Ensure that a temporary file always has owner-write permission while we are
writing to it. This avoids problems with some network filesystems when
transferring read-only files.
Any errors output about password-file reading no longer cause an error at
the end of the run about a partial transfer.
The --read-batch option for protocol 30 now ensures that several more
options are set correctly for the current batch file: --iconv, --acls,
--xattrs, --inplace, --append, and --append-verify.
Using --only-write-batch to a daemon receiver now works properly (older
versions would update some files while writing the batch).
Avoid outputting a "file has vanished" message when the file is a broken
symlink and --copy-unsafe-links or --copy-dirlinks is used (the code
already handled this for --copy-links).
Fixed the combination of --only-write-batch and --dry-run.
Fixed rsync's ability to remove files that are not writable by the file's
owner when rsync is running as the same user.
When transferring large files, the sender's hashtable of checksums is kept
at a more reasonable state of fullness (no more than 80% full) so that the
scanning of the hashtable will not bog down as the number of blocks
increases.

ENHANCEMENTS:

A new incremental-recursion algorithm is now used when rsync is talking to
another 3.x version. This starts the transfer going more quickly (before all
the files have been found), and requires much less memory. See the
--recursive option in the manpage for some restrictions.
Lowered memory use in the non-incremental-recursion algorithm for typical
option values (usually saving from 21-29 bytes per file).
The default --delete algorithm is now --delete-during when talking to a
3.x rsync. This is a faster scan than using --delete-before (which is the
default when talking to older rsync versions), and is compatible with the
new incremental recursion mode.
Rsync now allows multiple remote-source args to be specified rather than
having to rely on a special space-splitting side-effect of the remote-
shell. Additional remote args must specify the same host or an empty one
(e.g. empty: :file1 or ::module/file2). For example, this means that
local use of brace expansion now works: rsync -av host:dir/{f1,f2} .
Added the --protect-args (-s) option, that tells rsync to send most of
the command-line args at the start of the transfer rather than as args to
the remote-shell command. This protects them from space-splitting, and only
interprets basic wildcard special shell characters (*?[).
Added the --delete-delay option, which is a more efficient way to delete
files at the end of the transfer without needing a separate delete pass.
Added the --acls (-A) option to preserve Access Control Lists. This is
an improved version of the prior patch that was available, and it even
supports OS X ACLs. If you need to have backward compatibility with old,
ACL-patched versions of rsync, apply the acls.diff file from the patches
dir.
Added the --xattrs (-X) option to preserve extended attributes. This is
an improved version of the prior patch that was available, and it even
supports OS X xattrs (which includes their resource fork data). If you need
to have backward compatibility with old, xattr-patched versions of rsync,
apply the xattrs.diff file from the patches dir.
Added the --fake-super option that allows a non-super user to preserve all
attributes of a file by using a special extended-attribute idiom. It even
supports the storing of foreign ACL data on your backup server. There is
also an analogous fake super parameter for an rsync daemon.
Added the --iconv option, which allows rsync to convert filenames from one
character-set to another during the transfer. The default is to make this
feature available as long as your system has iconv_open(). If compilation
fails, specify --disable-iconv to configure, and then rebuild. If you want
rsync to perform character-set conversions by default, you can specify
--enable-iconv=CONVERT_STRING with the default value for the --iconv
option that you wish to use. For example, --enable-iconv=. is a good
choice. See the rsync manpage for an explanation of the --iconv option's
settings.
A new daemon config parameter, charset, lets you control the character-
set that is used during an --iconv transfer to/from a daemon module. You
can also set your daemon to refuse no-iconv if you want to force the
client to use an --iconv transfer (requiring an rsync 3.x client).
Added the --skip-compress=LIST option to override the default list of file
suffixes that will not be compressed when using --compress (-z).
The daemon's default for dont compress was extended to include: *.7z
*.mp[34] *.mov *.avi *.ogg *.jpg *.jpeg and the name-matching routine was also
optimized to run more quickly.
The --max-delete option now outputs a warning if it skipped any file
deletions, including a count of how many deletions were skipped. (Older
versions just silently stopped deleting things.)
You may specify --max-delete=0 to a 3.0.0 client to request that it warn
about extraneous files without deleting anything. If you're not sure what
version the client is, you can use the less-obvious --max-delete=-1, as
both old and new versions will treat that as the same request (though older
versions don't warn).
The --hard-link option now uses less memory on both the sending and
receiving side for all protocol versions. For protocol 30, the use of a
hashtable on the sending side allows us to more efficiently convey to the
receiver what files are linked together. This reduces the amount of data
sent over the socket by a considerable margin (rather than adding more
data), and limits the in-memory storage of the device+inode information to
just the sending side for the new protocol 30, or to the receiving side when
speaking an older protocol (note that older rsync versions kept the
device+inode information on both sides).
The filter rules now support a perishable (p) modifier that marks rules
that should not have an effect in a directory that is being deleted. e.g.
-f '-p .svn/' would only affect live .svn directories.
Rsync checks all the alternate-destination args for validity (e.g.
--link-dest). This lets the user know when they specified a directory that
does not exist.
If we get an ENOSYS error setting the time on a symlink, we don't complain
about it anymore (for those systems that even support the setting of the
modify-time on a symlink).
Protocol 30 now uses MD5 checksums instead of MD4.
Changed the --append option to not checksum the existing data in the
destination file, which speeds up file appending.
Added the --append-verify option, which works like the older --append
option (verifying the existing data in the destination file). For
compatibility with older rsync versions, any use of --append that is
talking protocol 29 or older will revert to the --append-verify method.
Added the --contimeout=SECONDS option that lets the user specify a
connection timeout for rsync daemon access.
Documented and extended the support for the RSYNC_CONNECT_PROG variable
that can be used to enhance the client side of a daemon connection.
Improved the dashes and double-quotes in the nroff manpage output.
Rsync now supports a lot more --no-OPTION override options.

INTERNAL:

The file-list sorting algorithm now uses a sort that keeps any same-named
items in the same order as they were specified. This allows rsync to always
ensure that the first of the duplicates is the one that will be included in
the copy. The new sort is also faster than the glibc version of qsort() and
mergesort().
Rsync now supports the transfer of 64-bit timestamps (time_t values).
Made the file-deletion code use a little less stack when recursing through a
directory hierarchy of extraneous files.
Fixed a build problem with older (2.x) versions of gcc.
Added some isType() functions that make dealing with signed characters
easier without forcing variables via casts.
Changed strcat/strcpy/sprintf function calls to use safer versions.
Upgraded the included popt version to 1.10.2 and improved its use of
string-handling functions.
Added missing prototypes for compatibility functions from the lib dir.
Configure determines if iconv() has a const arg, allowing us to avoid a
compiler warning.
Made the sending of some numbers more efficient for protocol 30.
Make sure that a daemon process doesn't mind if the client was weird and
omitted the --server option.
There are more internal logging categories available in protocol 30 than the
age-old FINFO and FERROR, including FERROR_XFER and FWARN. These new
categories allow some errors and warnings to go to stderr without causing an
erroneous end-of-run warning about some files not being able to be
transferred.
Improved the use of const on pointers.
Improved J.W.'s pool_alloc routines to add a way of incrementally freeing
older sections of a pool's memory.
The getaddrinfo.c compatibility code in the lib dir was replaced with some
new code (derived from samba, derived from PostgreSQL) that has a better
license than the old code.

Rsync is now licensed under the GPLv3 or later.
Rsync is now being maintained in a git repository instead of CVS (though
the old CVS repository still exists for historical access). Several
maintenance scripts were updated to work with git.
Generated files are no longer committed into the source repository. The
autoconf and autoheader commands are now automatically run during the normal
use of configure and make. The latest dev versions of all generated
files can also be copied from the samba.org web site (see the prepare-source
script's fetch option).
The patches directory of diff files is now built from branches in the
rsync git repository (branch patch/FOO creates file patches/FOO.diff). This
directory is now distributed in a separate separate tar file named
rsync-patches-VERSION.tar.gz instead of the main rsync-VERSION.tar.gz.
The proto.h file is now built using a simple perl script rather than a
complex awk script, which proved to be more widely compatible.
When running the tests, we now put our per-test temp dirs into a sub-
directory named testtmp (which is created, if missing). This allows someone
to symlink the testtmp directory to another filesystem (which is useful if
the build dir's filesystem does not support ACLs and xattrs, but another
filesystem does).
Rsync now has a way of handling protocol-version changes during the
development of a new protocol version. This causes any out-of-sync versions
to speak an older protocol rather than fail in a cryptic manner. This
addition makes it safer to deploy a pre-release version that may interact
with the public. This new exchange of sub-version info does not interfere
with the {MIN,MAX}_PROTOCOL_VERSION checking algorithm (which does not
have enough range to allow the main protocol number to be incremented for
every minor tweak in that happens during development).
The csprotocol.txt file was updated to mention the daemon protocol change in
the 3.0.0 release.

NEWS for rsync 2.6.9 (6 Nov 2006)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

If rsync is interrupted via a handled signal (such as SIGINT), it will once
again clean-up its temp file from the destination dir.
Fixed an overzealous sanitizing bug in the handling of the --link-dest,
--copy-dest, and --compare-dest options to a daemon without chroot: if
the copy's destination dir is deeper than the top of the module's path,
these options now accept a safe number of parent-dir (../) references (since
these options are relative to the destination dir). The old code incorrectly
chopped off all ../ prefixes for these options, no matter how deep the
destination directory was in the module's hierarchy.
Fixed a bug where a deferred info/error/log message could get sent directly
to the sender instead of being handled by rwrite() in the generator. This
fixes an unexpected tag 3 fatal error, and should also fix a potential
problem where a deferred info/error message from the receiver might bypass
the log file and get sent only to the client process. (These problems could
only affect an rsync daemon that was receiving files.)
Fixed a bug when --inplace was combined with a --*-dest option and we
update a file's data using an alternate basis file. The code now notices
that it needs to copy the matching data from the basis file instead of
(wrongly) assuming that it was already present in the file.
Fixed a bug where using --dry-run with a --*-dest option with a path
relative to a directory that does not yet exist: the affected option gets
its proper path value so that the output of the dry-run is right.
Fixed a bug in the %f logfile escape when receiving files: the destination
path is now included in the output (e.g. you can now tell when a user
specifies a subdir inside a module).
If the receiving side fails to create a directory, it will now skip trying
to update everything that is inside that directory.
If --link-dest is specified with --checksum but without --times, rsync
will now allow a hard-link to be created to a matching link-dest file even
when the file's modify-time doesn't match the server's file.
The daemon now calls more timezone-using functions prior to doing a chroot.
This should help some C libraries to generate proper timestamps from inside
a chrooted daemon (and to not try to access /etc/timezone over and over
again).
Fixed a bug in the handling of an absolute --partial-dir=ABS_PATH option:
it now deletes an alternate basis file from the partial-dir that was used to
successfully update a destination file.
Fixed a bug in the handling of --delete-excluded when using a per-dir
merge file: the merge file is now honored on the receiving side, and only
its unqualified include/exclude commands are ignored (just as is done for
global include/excludes).
Fixed a recent bug where --delete was not working when transferring from
the root (/) of the filesystem with --relative enabled.
Fixed a recent bug where an --exclude='*' could affect the root (/) of the
filesystem with --relative enabled.
When --inplace creates a file, it is now created with owner read/write
permissions (0600) instead of no permissions at all. This avoids a problem
continuing a transfer that was interrupted (since --inplace will not
update a file that has no write permissions).
If either --remove-source-files or --remove-sent-files is enabled and we
are unable to remove the source file, rsync now outputs an error.
Fixed a bug in the daemon's incoming chmod rule: newly-created directories
no longer get the 'F' (file) rules applied to them.
Fixed an infinite loop bug when a filter rule was rejected due to being
overly long.
When the server receives a --partial-dir option from the client, it no
longer runs the client-side code that adds an assumed filter rule (since the
client will be sending us the rules in the usual manner, and they may have
chosen to override the auto-added rule).

ENHANCEMENTS:

Added the --log-file=FILE and --log-file-format=FORMAT options. These
can be used to tell any rsync to output what it is doing to a log file.
They work with a client rsync, a non-daemon server rsync (see the manpage
for instructions), and also allows the overriding of rsyncd.conf settings
when starting a daemon.
The --log-format option was renamed to be --out-format to avoid
confusing it with affecting the log-file output. (The old option remains as
an alias for the new to preserve backward compatibility.)
Made log file and syslog facility settable on a per-module basis in the
daemon's config file.
Added the --remove-source-files option as a replacement for the (now
deprecated) --remove-sent-files option. This new option removes all
non-dirs from the source directories, even if the file was already
up-to-date. This fixes a problem where interrupting an rsync that was using
--remove-sent-files and restarting it could leave behind a file that the
earlier rsync synchronized, but didn't get to remove. (The deprecated
--remove-sent-files is still understood for now, and still behaves in the
same way as before.)
Added the option --no-motd to suppress the message-of-the-day output from
a daemon when doing a copy. (See the manpage for a caveat.)
Added a new environment variable to the pre-/post-xfer exec commands (in the
daemon's config file): RSYNC_PID. This value will be the same in both the
pre- and post-xfer commands, so it can be used as a unique ID if the
pre-xfer command wants to cache some arg/request info for the post-xfer
command.

INTERNAL:

Did a code audit using IBM's code-checker program and made several changes,
including: replacing most of the strcpy() and sprintf() calls with
strlcpy(), snprintf(), and memcpy(), adding a 0-value to an enum that had
been intermingling a literal 0 with the defined enum values, silencing some
uninitialized memory checks, marking some functions with a noreturn
attribute, and changing an if that could never succeed on some platforms
into a pre-processor directive that conditionally compiles the code.
Fixed a potential bug in f_name_cmp() when both the args are a top-level
. dir (which doesn't happen in normal operations).
Changed exit_cleanup() so that it can never return instead of exit. The
old code might return if it found the exit_cleanup() function was being
called recursively. The new code is segmented so that any recursive calls
move on to the next step of the exit-processing.
The macro WIFEXITED(stat) will now be defined if the OS didn't already
define it.

The acls.diff and xattrs.diff patches have received a bunch of work to make
them much closer to being acceptable in the main distribution. The xattrs
patch also has some preliminary Mac OS X and FreeBSD compatibility code that
various system types to exchange extended file-attributes.
A new diff in the patches dir, fake-root.diff, allows rsync to maintain a
backup hierarchy with full owner, group, and device info without actually
running as root. It does this using a special extended attribute, so it
depends on xattrs.diff (which depends on acls.diff).
The rsync.yo and rsyncd.conf.yo files have been updated to work better with
the latest yodl 2.x releases.
Updated config.guess and config.sub to their 2006-07-02 versions.
Updated various files to include the latest FSF address and to have
consistent opening comments.

NEWS for rsync 2.6.8 (22 Apr 2006)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

Fixed a bug in the exclude code where an anchored exclude without any
wildcards fails to match an absolute source arg, but only when --relative
is in effect.
Improved the I/O code for the generator to fix a potential hang when the
receiver gets an EOF on the socket but the generator's select() call never
indicates that the socket is writable for it to be notified about the EOF.
(This can happen when using stunnel).
Fixed a problem with the file-reading code where a failed read (such as that
caused by a bad sector) would not advance the file's read-position beyond
the failed read's data.
Fixed a logging bug where the log file directive was not being honored in
a single-use daemon (one spawned by a remote-shell connection or by init).
If rsync cannot honor the --delete option, we output an error and exit
instead of silently ignoring the option.
Fixed a bug in the --link-dest code that prevented special files (such as
fifos) from being linked.
The ability to hard-link symlinks and special files is now determined at
configure time instead of at runtime. This fixes a bug with --link-dest
creating a hard-link to a symlink's referent on a BSD system.

ENHANCEMENTS:

In daemon mode, if rsync fails to bind to the requested port, the error(s)
returned by socket() and/or bind() are now logged.
When we output a fatal error, we now output the version of rsync in the
message.
Improved the documentation for the --owner and --group options.
The rsyncstats script in support has an improved line-parsing regex that
is easier to read and also makes it to parse syslog-generated lines.
A new script in support: file-attr-restore, can be used to restore the
attributes of a file-set (the permissions, ownership, and group info) taken
from the cached output of a find ARG... -ls command.

Removed the unused function write_int_named(), the unused variable
io_read_phase, and the rarely used variable io_write_phase. This also
elides the confusing 'phase "unknown"' part of one error message.
Removed two unused configure checks and two related (also unused)
compatibility functions.
The xattrs.diff patch received a security fix that prevents a potential
buffer overflow in the receive_xattr() code.
The acls.diff patch has been improved quite a bit, with more to come.
A new patch was added: log-file.diff. This contains an early version of a
future option, --log-file=FILE, that will allow any rsync to log its
actions to a file (something that only a daemon supports at present).

NEWS for rsync 2.6.7 (11 Mar 2006)

Changes in this version:

OUTPUT CHANGES:

The letter 'D' in the itemized output was being used for both devices
(character or block) as well as other special files (such as fifos and named
sockets). This has changed to separate non-device special files under the
'S' designation (e.g. cS+++++++ path/fifo). See also the --specials
option, below.
The way rsync escapes unreadable characters has changed. First, rsync now
has support for recognizing valid multi-byte character sequences in your
current locale, allowing it to escape fewer characters than before for a
locale such as UTF-8. Second, it now uses an escape idiom of \#123, which
is the literal string \# followed by exactly 3 octal digits. Rsync no
longer doubles a backslash character in a filename (e.g. it used to output
foo\\bar when copying foo\bar) -- now it only escapes a backslash that
is followed by a hash-sign and 3 digits (0-9) (e.g. it will output
foo\#134#789 when copying foo\#789). See also the --8-bit-output
(-8) option, mentioned below.

Script writers: the local rsync is the one that outputs escaped names, so if
you need to support unescaping of filenames for older rsyncs, I'd suggest
that you parse the output of rsync --version and only use the old
unescaping rules for 2.6.5 and 2.6.6.

BUG FIXES:

Fixed a really old bug that caused --checksum (-c) to checksum all the
files encountered during the delete scan (ouch).
Fixed a potential hang in a remote generator: when the receiver gets a
read-error on the socket, it now signals the generator about this so that
the generator does not try to send any of the terminating error messages to
the client (avoiding a potential hang in some setups).
Made hard-links work with symlinks and devices again.
If the sender gets an early EOF reading a source file, we propagate this
error to the receiver so that it can discard the file and try requesting it
again (which is the existing behavior for other kinds of read errors).
If a device-file/special-file changes permissions, rsync now updates the
permissions without recreating the file.
If the user specifies a remote-host for both the source and destination, we
now output a syntax error rather than trying to open the destination
hostspec as a filename.
When --inplace creates a new destination file, rsync now creates it with
permissions 0600 instead of 0000 -- this makes restarting possible when the
transfer gets interrupted in the middle of sending a new file.
Reject the combination of --inplace and --sparse since the sparse-output
algorithm doesn't work when overwriting existing data.
Fixed the directory name in the error that is output when pop_dir() fails.
Really fixed the parsing of a ! entry in .cvsignore files this time.
If the generator gets a stat() error on a file, output it (this used to
require at least -vv for the error to be seen).
If waitpid() fails or the child rsync didn't exit cleanly, we now handle the
exit status properly and generate a better error.
Fixed some glitches in the double-verbose output when using --copy-dest,
--link-dest, or --compare-dest. Also improved how the verbose output
handles hard-links (within the transfer) that had an up-to-date alternate
dest file, and copied files (via --copy-dest).
Fixed the matching of the dont-compress items (e.g. *.gz) against files
that have a path component containing a slash.
If the code reading a filter/exclude file gets an EINTR error, rsync now
clears the error flag on the file handle so it can keep on reading.
If --relative is active, the sending side cleans up trailing / or /.
suffixes to avoid triggering a bug in older rsync versions. Also, we now
reject a .. dir if it would be sent as a relative dir.
If a non-directory is in the way of a directory and rsync is run with
--dry-run and --delete, rsync no longer complains about not being able
to opendir() the not-yet present directory.
When --list-only is used and a non-existent local destination dir was also
specified as a destination, rsync no longer generates a warning about being
unable to create the missing directory.
Fixed some problems with --relative --no-implied-dirs when the destination
directory did not yet exist: we can now create a symlink or device when it
is the first thing in the missing dir, and --fuzzy no longer complains
about being unable to open the missing dir.
Fixed a bug where the --copy-links option would not affect implied
directories without --copy-unsafe-links (see --relative).
Got rid of the need for --force to be used in some circumstances with
--delete-after (making it consistent with
--delete-before/--delete-during).
Rsync now ignores the SIGXFSZ signal, just in case your OS sends this when a
file is too large (rsync handles the write error).
Fixed a bug in the Proxy-Authorization header's base64-encoded value: it was
not properly padded with trailing '=' chars. This only affects a user that
need to use a password-authenticated proxy for an outgoing daemon-rsync
connection.
If we're transferring an empty directory to a new name, rsync no longer
forces S_IWUSR if it wasn't already set, nor does it accidentally leave it
set.
Fixed a bug in the debug output (-vvvvv) that could mention the wrong
checksum for the current file offset.
Rsync no longer allows a single directory to be copied over a non-directory
destination arg.

ENHANCEMENTS:

Added the --append option that makes rsync append data onto files that are
longer on the source than the destination (this includes new files).
Added the --min-size=SIZE option to exclude small files from the transfer.
Added the --compress-level option to allow you to set how aggressive
rsync's compression should be (this option implies --compress).
Enhanced the parsing of the SIZE value for --min-size and --max-size to
allow easy entry of multiples of 1000 (instead of just multiples of 1024)
and off-by-one values too (e.g. --max-size=8mb-1).
Added the --8-bit-output (-8) option, which tells rsync to avoid
escaping high-bit characters that it thinks are unreadable in the current
locale.
The new option --human-readable (-h) changes the output of --progress,
--stats, and the end-of-run summary to be easier to read. If repeated, the
units become powers of 1024 instead of powers of 1000. (The old meaning of
-h, as a shorthand for --help, still works as long as you just use it on
its own, as in rsync -h.)
If lutimes() and/or lchmod() are around, use them to allow the preservation
of attributes on symlinks.
The --link-dest option now affects symlinks and devices (when possible).
Added two config items to the rsyncd.conf parsing: pre-xfer exec and
post-xfer exec. These allow a command to be specified on a per-module
basis that will be run before and/or after a daemon-mode transfer. (See the
manpage for a list of the environment variables that are set with
information about the transfer.)
When using the --relative option, you can now insert a dot dir in the
source path to indicate where the replication of the source dirs should
start. For example, if you specify a source path of
rsync://host/module/foo/bar/./baz/dir with -R, rsync will now only
replicate the baz/dir part of the source path (note: a trailing dot dir is
unaffected unless it also has a trailing slash).
Added some new --no-FOO options that make it easier to override unwanted
implied or default options. For example, -a --no-o (aka --archive --no-owner) can be used to turn off the preservation of file ownership that
is implied by -a.
Added the --chmod=MODE option that allows the destination permissions to
be changed from the source permissions. E.g. --chmod=g+w,o-rwx
Added the incoming chmod and outgoing chmod daemon options that allow a
module to specify what permissions changes should be applied to all files
copied to and from the daemon.
Allow the --temp-dir option to be specified when starting a daemon, which
sets the default temporary directory for incoming files.
If --delete is combined with --dirs without --recursive, rsync will
now delete in any directory whose content is being synchronized.
If --backup is combined with --delete without --backup-dir (and
without --delete-excluded), we add a protect filter-rule to ensure that
files with the backup suffix are not deleted.
The file-count stats that are output by --progress were improved to better
indicate what the numbers mean. For instance, the output: (xfer#5, to-check=8383/9999) indicates that this was the fifth file to be
transferred, and we still need to check 8383 more files out of a total of
9999.
The include/exclude code now allows a dir/*** directive (with 3 trailing
stars) to match both the dir itself as well as all the content below the dir
(dir/** would not match the dir).
Added the --prune-empty-dirs (-m) option that makes the receiving rsync
discard empty chains of directories from the file-list. This makes it easier
to selectively copy files from a source hierarchy and end up with just the
directories needed to hold the resulting files.
If the --itemize-changes (-i) option is repeated, rsync now includes
unchanged files in the itemized output (similar to -vv, but without all
the other verbose messages that can get in the way). Of course, the client
must be version 2.6.7 for this to work, but the remote rsync only needs to
be 2.6.7 if you're pushing files.
Added the --specials option to tell rsync to copy non-device special files
(which rsync now attempts even as a normal user). The --devices option now
requests the copying of just devices (character and block). The -D option
still requests both (e.g. --devices and --specials), -a still implies
-D, and non-root users still get a silent downgrade that omits device
copying.
Added the --super option to make the receiver always attempt super-user
activities. This is useful for systems that allow things such as devices to
be created or ownership to be set without being UID 0, and is also useful
for someone who wants to ensure that errors will be output if the receiving
rsync isn't being run as root.
Added the --sockopts option for those few who want to customize the TCP
options used to contact a daemon rsync.
Added a way for the --temp-dir option to be combined with a partial-dir
setting that lets rsync avoid non-atomic updates (for those times when
--temp-dir is not being used because space is tight).
A new support script, files-to-excludes, will transform a list of files into
a set of include/exclude directives that will copy those files.
A new option, --executability (-E) can be used to preserve just the
execute bit on files, for those times when using the --perms option is not
desired.
The daemon now logs each connection and also each module-list request that
it receives.
New log-format options: %M (modtime), %U (uid), %G (gid), and %B (permission
bits, e.g. rwxr-xrwt).
The --dry-run option no longer forces the enabling of --verbose.
The --remove-sent-files option now does a better job of incrementally
removing the sent files on the sending side (older versions tended to clump
up all the removals at the end).
A daemon now supersedes its minimal SIGCHLD handler with the standard
PID-remembering version after forking. This ensures that the generator can
get the child-exit status from the receiver.
Use of the --bwlimit option no longer interferes with the remote rsync
sending error messages about invalid/refused options.
Rsync no longer returns a usage error when used with one local source arg
and no destination: this now implies the --list-only option, just like the
comparable situation with a remote source arg.
Added the --copy-dirlinks option, a more limited version of
--copy-links.
Various documentation improvements, including: a better synopsis, some
improved examples, a better discussion of the presence and absence of
--perms (including how it interacts with the new --executability and
--chmod options), an extended discussion of --temp-dir, an improved
discussion of --partial-dir, a better description of rsync's pattern
matching characters, an improved --no-implied-dirs section, and the
documenting of what the --stats option outputs.
Various new and updated diffs in the patches dir, including: acls.diff,
xattrs.diff, atimes.diff, detect-renamed.diff, and slp.diff.

INTERNAL:

We now use sigaction() and sigprocmask() if possible, and fall back on
signal() if not. Using sigprocmask() ensures that rsync enables all the
signals that it needs, just in case it was started in a masked state.
Some buffer sizes were expanded a bit, particularly on systems where
MAXPATHLEN is overly small (e.g. Cygwin).
If io_printf() tries to format more data than fits in the buffer, exit
with an error instead of transmitting a truncated buffer.
If a va_copy macro is defined, lib/snprintf.c will use it when defining
the VA_COPY macro.
Reduced the amount of stack memory needed for each level of directory
recursion by nearly MAXPATHLEN bytes.
The wildmatch function was extended to allow an array of strings to be
supplied as the string to match. This allows the exclude code to do less
string copying.
Got rid of the safe_fname() function (and all the myriad calls) and
replaced it with a new function in the log.c code that filters all the
output going to the terminal.
Unified the f_name() and the f_name_to() functions.
Improved the hash-table code the sender uses to handle checksums to make it
use slightly less memory and run just a little faster.

The diffs in the patches dir now require patch -p1 <DIFF instead of the
previous -p0. Also, the version included in the release tar now affect
generated files (e.g. configure, rsync.1, proto.h, etc.), so it is no longer
necessary to run autoconf and/or yodl unless you're applying a patch that
was checked out from CVS.
Several diffs in the patches dir now use the proper --enable-FOO configure
option instead of --with-FOO to turn on the inclusion of the newly patched
feature.
There is a new script, prepare-source than can be used to update the
various generated files (proto.h, configure, etc.) even before configure has
created the Makefile (this is mainly useful when patching the source with a
patch that doesn't affect generated files).
The testsuite now sets HOME so that it won't be affected by a file such as
~/.popt.

NEWS for rsync 2.6.6 (28 Jul 2005)

Changes in this version:

SECURITY FIXES:

The zlib code was upgraded to version 1.2.3 in order to make it more secure.
While the widely-publicized security problem in zlib 1.2.2 did not affect
rsync, another security problem surfaced that affects rsync's zlib 1.1.4.

BUG FIXES:

The setting of flist->high in clean_flist() was wrong for an empty list.
This could cause flist_find() to crash in certain rare circumstances (e.g.
if just the right directory setup was around when --fuzzy was combined
with --link-dest).
The outputting of hard-linked files when verbosity was > 1 was not right:
(1) Without -i it would output the name of each hard-linked file as though
it had been changed; it now outputs a is hard linked message for the file.
(2) With -i it would output all dots for the unchanged attributes of a
hard-link; it now changes those dots to spaces, as is done for other totally
unchanged items.
When backing up a changed symlink or device, get rid of any old backup item
so that we don't get an already exists error.
A couple places that were comparing a local and a remote modification-time
were not honoring the --modify-window option.
Fixed a bug where the 'p' (permissions) itemized-changes flag might get set
too often (if some non-significant mode bits differed).
Fixed a really old, minor bug that could cause rsync to warn about being
unable to mkdir() a path that ends in /. because it just created the
directory (required --relative, --no-implied-dirs, a source path that
ended in either a trailing slash or a trailing /., and a non-existing
destination dir to tickle the bug in a recent version).

ENHANCEMENTS:

Made the max verbosity setting in the rsyncd.conf file settable on a
per-module basis (which now matches the documentation).
The rrsync script has been upgraded to verify the args of options that take
args (instead of rejecting any such options). It was also changed to try to
be more secure and to fix a problem in the parsing of a pull operation that
has multiple source args. (See the support dir.)
Improved the documentation that explains the difference between a normal
daemon transfer and a daemon-over remote-shell transfer.
Some of the diffs supplied in the patches dir were fixed and/or improved.

BUILD CHANGES:

Made configure define NOBODY_USER (currently hard-wired to nobody) and
NOBODY_GROUP (set to either nobody or nogroup depending on what we
find in the /etc/group file).
Added a test to the test suite, itemized.test, that tests the output of -i
(log-format w/%i) and some double-verbose messages.

NEWS for rsync 2.6.5 (1 Jun 2005)

Changes in this version:

OUTPUT CHANGES:

Non-printable chars in filenames are now output using backslash-escaped
characters rather than '?'s. Any non-printable character is output using 3
digits of octal (e.g. \n -> \012), and a backslash is now output as
\\. Rsync also uses your locale setting, which can make it treat fewer
high-bit characters as non-printable.
If rsync received an empty file-list when pulling files, it would output a
nothing to do message and exit with a 0 (success) exit status, even if the
remote rsync returned an error (it did not do this under the same conditions
when pushing files). This was changed to make the pulling behavior the same
as the pushing behavior: we now do the normal end-of-run outputting
(depending on options) and exit with the appropriate exit status.

BUG FIXES:

A crash bug was fixed when a daemon had its path set to /, did not have
chroot enabled, and used some anchored excludes in the rsyncd.conf file.
Fixed a bug in the transfer of a single file when -H is specified (rsync
would either infinite loop or perhaps crash).
Fixed a case where the generator might try (and fail) to tweak the
write-permissions of a read-only directory in list-only mode (this only
caused an annoying warning message).
If --compare-dest or --link-dest uses a locally-copied file as the basis
for an updated version, log this better when --verbose or -i is in
effect.
Fixed the accidental disabling of --backup during the --delete-after
processing.
Restored the ability to use the --address option in client mode (in
addition to its use in daemon mode).
Make sure that some temporary progress information from the delete
processing does not get left on the screen when it is followed by a newline.
When --existing skips a directory with extra verbosity, refer to it as a
directory, not a file.
When transferring a single file to a different-named file, any generator
messages that are source-file related no longer refer to the file by the
destination filename.
Fixed a bug where hard-linking a group of files might fail if the generator
hasn't created a needed destination directory yet.
Fixed a bug where a hard-linked group of files that is newly-linked to a
file in a --link-dest dir doesn't link the files from the rest of the
cluster.
When deleting files with the --one-file-system (-x) option set, rsync no
longer tries to remove files from inside a mount-point on the receiving
side. Also, we don't complain about being unable to remove the mount-point
dir.
Fixed a compatibility problem when using --cvs-ignore (-C) and sending
files to an older rsync without using --delete.
Make sure that a - ! or + ! include/exclude pattern does not trigger the
list-clearing action that is reserved for !.
Avoid a timeout in the generator when the sender/receiver aren't handling
the generator's checksum output quickly enough.
Fixed the omission of some directories in the delete processing when
--relative (-R) was combined with a source path that had a trailing
slash.
Fixed a case where rsync would erroneously delete some files and then
re-transfer them when the options --relative (-R) and --recursive
(-r) were both enabled (along with --delete) and a source path had a
trailing slash.
Make sure that --max-size doesn't affect a device or a symlink.
Make sure that a system with a really small MAXPATHLEN does not cause the
buffers in readfd_unbuffered() to be too small to receive normal messages.
(This mainly affected Cygwin.)
If a source pathname ends with a filename of .., treat it as if ../ had
been specified (so that we don't copy files to the parent dir of the
destination).
If --delete is combined with a file-listing rsync command (i.e. no
transfer is happening), avoid outputting a warning that we couldn't delete
anything.
If --stats is specified with --delete-after, ensure that all the
deleting messages are output before the statistics.
Improved one if in the deletion code that was only checking errno for
ENOTEMPTY when it should have also been checking for EEXIST (for
compatibility with OS variations).

ENHANCEMENTS:

Added the --only-write-batch=FILE option that may be used (instead of
--write-batch=FILE) to create a batch file without doing any actual
updating of the destination. This allows you to divert all the file-updating
data away from a slow data link (as long as you are pushing the data to the
remote server when creating the batch).
When the generator is taking a long time to fill up its output buffer (e.g.
if the transferred files are few, small, or missing), it now periodically
flushes the output buffer so that the sender/receiver can get started on the
files sooner rather than later.
Improved the keep-alive code to handle a long silence between the sender and
the receiver that can occur when the sender is receiving the checksum data
for a large file.
Improved the auth-errors that are logged by the daemon to include some
information on why the authorization failed: wrong user, password mismatch,
etc. (The client-visible message is unchanged!)
Improved the client's handling of an @ERROR from a daemon so that it does
not complain about an unexpectedly closed socket (since we really did expect
the socket to close).
If the daemon can't open the log-file specified in rsyncd.conf, fall back to
using syslog and log an appropriate warning. This is better than what was
typically a totally silent (and fatal) failure (since a daemon is not
usually run with the --no-detach option that was necessary to see the
error on stderr).
The manpages now consistently refer to an rsync daemon as a daemon
instead of a server (to distinguish it from the server process in a
non-daemon transfer).
Made a small change to the rrsync script (restricted rsync -- in the support
dir) to make a read-only server reject all --remove-* options when sending
files (to future-proof it against the possibility of other similar options
being added at some point).

INTERNAL:

Rsync now calls setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). This enables isprint() to better
discern which filename characters need to be escaped in messages (which
should result in fewer escaped characters in some locales).
Improved the naming of the log-file open/reopen/close functions.
Removed some protocol-compatibility code that was only needed to help
someone running a pre-release of 2.6.4.

BUILD CHANGES:

Added configure option --disable-locale to disable any use of setlocale()
in the binary.
Fixed a bug in the SUPPORT{,_HARD}_LINKS #defines which prevented rsync
from being built without symlink or hard-link support.
Only #define HAVE_REMSH if it is going to be set to 1.
Configure now disables the use of mkstemp() under HP-UX (since they refuse
to fix its broken handling of large files).
Configure now explicitly checks for the lseek64() function so that the code
can use HAVE_LSEEK64 instead of inferring lseek64()'s presence based on
the presence of the off64_t type.
Configure no longer mentions the change in the default remote-shell (from
rsh to ssh) that occurred for the 2.6.0 release.
Some minor enhancements to the test scripts.
Added a few new *.diff files to the patches dir, including a patch that
enables the optional copying of extended attributes.

NEWS for rsync 2.6.4 (30 March 2005)

Changes in this version:

PROTOCOL NUMBER:

The protocol number was changed to 29.

OUTPUT CHANGES:

When rsync deletes a directory and outputs a verbose message about it, it
now appends a trailing slash to the name instead of (only sometimes)
outputting a preceding "directory " string.
The --stats output will contain file-list time-statistics if both sides
are 2.6.4, or if the local side is 2.6.4 and the files are being pushed
(since the stats come from the sending side). (Requires protocol 29 for a
pull.)
The %o (operation) log-format escape now has a third value (besides send
and recv): del. (with trailing dot to make it 4 chars). This changes
the way deletions are logged in the daemon's log file.
When the --log-format option is combined with --verbose, rsync now
avoids outputting the name of the file twice in most circumstances. As long
as the --log-format item does not refer to any post-transfer items (such
as %b or %c), the --log-format message is output prior to the transfer, so
--verbose is now the equivalent of a --log-format of '%n%L' (which
outputs the name and any link info). If the log output must occur after the
transfer to be complete, the only time the name is also output prior to the
transfer is when --progress was specified (so that the name will precede
the progress stats, and the full --log-format output will come after).
Non-printable characters in filenames are replaced with a '?' to avoid
corrupting the screen or generating empty lines in the output.

BUG FIXES:

Restore the list-clearing behavior of ! in a .cvsignore file (2.6.3 was
only treating it as a special token in an rsync include/exclude file).
The combination of --verbose and --dry-run now mentions the full list of
changes that would be output without --dry-run.
Avoid a mkdir warning when removing a directory in the destination that
already exists in the --backup-dir.
An OS that has a binary mode for its files (such as Cygwin) needed
setmode(fd, O_BINARY) called on the temp-file we opened with mkstemp().
(Fix derived from Cygwin's 2.6.3 rsync package.)
Fixed a potential hang when verbosity is high, the client side is the
sender, and the file-list is large.
Fixed a potential protocol-corrupting bug where the generator could merge a
message from the receiver into the middle of a multiplexed packet of data if
only part of that data had been written out to the socket when the message
from the generator arrived.
We now check if the OS doesn't support using mknod() for creating FIFOs and
sockets, and compile-in some compatibility code using mkfifo() and socket()
when necessary.
Fixed an off-by-one error in the handling of --max-delete=N. Also, if the
--max-delete limit is exceeded during a run, we now output a warning about
this at the end of the run and exit with a new error code (25).
One place in the code wasn't checking if fork() failed.
The ignore nonreadable daemon parameter used to erroneously affect
readable symlinks that pointed to a non-existent file.
If the OS does not have lchown() and a chown() of a symlink will affect the
referent of a symlink (as it should), we no longer try to set the user and
group of a symlink.
The generator now properly runs the hard-link loop and the dir-time
rewriting loop after we're sure that the redo phase is complete.
When --backup was specified with --partial-dir=DIR, where DIR is a
relative path, the backup code was erroneously trying to backup a file that
was put into the partial-dir.
If a file gets resent in a single transfer and the --backup option is
enabled along with --inplace, rsync no longer performs a duplicate backup
(it used to overwrite the first backup with the failed file).
One call to flush_write_file() was not being checked for an error.
The --no-relative option was not being sent from the client to a server
sender.
If an rsync daemon specified dont compress = ... for a file and the client
tried to specify --compress, the libz code was not handling a compression
level of 0 properly. This could cause a transfer failure if the block-size
for a file was large enough (e.g. rsync might have exited with an error for
large files).
Fixed a bug that would sometimes surface when using --compress and sending
a file with a block-size larger than 64K (either manually specified, or
computed due to the file being really large). Prior versions of rsync would
sometimes fail to decompress the data properly, and thus the transferred
file would fail its verification.
If a daemon can't open the specified log file (i.e. syslog is not being
used), die without crashing. We also output an error about the failure on
stderr (which will only be seen if --no-detach was specified) and exit
with a new error code (6).
A local transfer no longer duplicates all its include/exclude options (since
the forked process already has a copy of the exclude list, there's no need
to send them a set of duplicates).
The output of the items that are being updated by the generator (dirs,
symlinks, devices) is now intermingled in the proper order with the output
from the items that the receiver is updating (regular files) when pulling.
This misordering was particularly bad when --progress was specified.
(Requires protocol 29.)
When --timeout is specified, lulls that occur in the transfer while the
generator is doing work that does not generate socket traffic (looking for
changed files, deleting files, doing directory-time touch-ups, etc.) will
cause a new keep-alive packet to be sent that should keep the transfer going
as long as the generator continues to make progress. (Requires protocol 29.)
The stat size of a device is not added to the total file size of the items
in the transfer (the size might be undefined on some OSes).
Fixed a problem with refused-option messages sometimes not making it back to
the client side when a remote --files-from was in effect and the daemon
was the receiver.
The --compare-dest option was not updating a file that differed in (the
preserved) attributes from the version in the compare-dest DIR.
When rsync is copying files into a write-protected directory, fixed the
change-report output for the directory so that we don't report an identical
directory as changed.

ENHANCEMENTS:

Rsync now supports popt's option aliases, which means that you can use
/etc/popt and/or ~/.popt to create your own option aliases.
Added the --delete-during (--del) option which will delete files from
the receiving side incrementally as each directory in the transfer is being
processed. This makes it more efficient than the default,
before-the-transfer behavior, which is now also available as
--delete-before (and is still the default --delete-WHEN option that will
be chosen if --delete or --delete-excluded is specified without a
--delete-WHEN choice). All the --del* options infer --delete, so an
rsync daemon that refuses delete will still refuse to allow any
file-deleting options (including the new --remove-sent-files option).
All the --delete-WHEN options are now more memory efficient: Previously an
duplicate set of file-list objects was created on the receiving side for the
entire destination hierarchy. The new algorithm only creates one directory
of objects at a time (for files inside the transfer).
Added the --copy-dest option, which works like --link-dest except that
it locally copies identical files instead of hard-linking them.
Added support for specifying multiple --compare-dest, --copy-dest, or
--link-dest options, but only of a single type. (Promoted from the patches
dir and enhanced.) (Requires protocol 29.)
Added the --max-size option. (Promoted from the patches dir.)
The daemon-mode options are now separated from the normal rsync options so
that they can't be mixed together. This makes it impossible to start a
daemon that has improper default option values (which could cause problems
when a client connects, such as hanging or crashing).
The --bwlimit option may now be used in combination with --daemon to
specify both a default value for the daemon side and a value that cannot be
exceeded by a user-specified --bwlimit option.
Added the port parameter to the rsyncd.conf file. (Promoted from the
patches dir.) Also added address. The command-line options take precedence
over a config-file option, as expected.
In _exit_cleanup(): when we are exiting with a partially-received file, we
now flush any data in the write-cache before closing the partial file.
The --inplace support was enhanced to work with --compare-dest,
--link-dest, and (the new) --copy-dest options. (Requires protocol 29.)
Added the --dirs (-d) option for an easier way to copy directories
without recursion. Any directories that are encountered are created on the
destination. Specifying a directory with a trailing slash copies its
immediate contents to the destination.
The --files-from option now implies --dirs (-d).
Added the --list-only option, which is mainly a way for the client to put
the server into listing mode without needing to resort to any internal
option kluges (e.g. the age-old use of -r --exclude='/*/*' for a
non-recursive listing). This option is used automatically (behind the
scenes) when a modern rsync speaks to a modern daemon, but may also be
specified manually if you want to force the use of the --list-only option
over a remote-shell connection.
Added the --omit-dir-times (-O) option, which will avoid updating the
modified time for directories when --times was specified. This option will
avoid an extra pass through the file-list at the end of the transfer (to
tweak all the directory times), which may provide an appreciable speedup for
a really large transfer. (Promoted from the patches dir.)
Added the --filter (-f) option and its helper option, -F. Filter rules
are an extension to the existing include/exclude handling that also supports
nested filter files as well as per-directory filter files (like .cvsignore,
but with full filter-rule parsing). This new option was chosen in order to
ensure that all existing include/exclude processing remained 100% compatible
with older versions. Protocol 29 is needed for full filter-rule support, but
backward-compatible rules work with earlier protocol versions. (Promoted
from the patches dir and enhanced.)
Added the --delay-updates option that puts all updated files into a
temporary directory (by default .~tmp~, but settable via the
--partial-dir=DIR option) until the end of the transfer. This makes the
updates a little more atomic for a large transfer.
If rsync is put into the background, any output from --progress is
reduced.
Documented the max verbosity setting for rsyncd.conf. (This setting was
added a couple releases ago, but left undocumented.)
The sender and the generator now double-check the file-list index they are
given, and refuse to try to do a file transfer on a non-file index (since
that would indicate that something had gone very wrong).
Added the --itemize-changes (-i) option, which is a way to output a more
detailed list of what files changed and in what way. The effect is the same
as specifying a --log-format of %i %n%L (see both the rsync and
rsyncd.conf manpages). Works with --dry-run too.
Added the --fuzzy (-y) option, which attempts to find a basis file for a
file that is being created from scratch. The current algorithm only looks in
the destination directory for the created file, but it does attempt to find
a match based on size/mod-time (in case the file was renamed with no other
changes) as well as based on a fuzzy name-matching algorithm. This option
requires protocol 29 because it needs the new file-sorting order. (Promoted
from patches dir and enhanced.) (Requires protocol 29.)
Added the --remove-sent-files option, which lets you move files between
systems.
The hostname in HOST:PATH or HOST::PATH may now be an IPv6 literal enclosed
in '[' and ']' (e.g. [::1]). (We already allowed IPv6 literals in the
rsync://HOST:PORT/PATH format.)
When rsync recurses to build the file list, it no longer keeps open one or
more directory handles from the dir's parent dirs.
When building under windows, the default for --daemon is now to avoid
detaching, requiring the new --detach option to force rsync to detach.
The --dry-run option can now be combined with either --write-batch or
--read-batch, allowing you to run a do-nothing test command to see what
would happen without --dry-run.
The daemon's read only config item now sets an internal read_only
variable that makes extra sure that no write/delete calls on the read-only
side can succeed.
The log-format % escapes can now have a numeric field width in between the %
and the escape letter (e.g. %-40n %08p).
Improved the option descriptions in the --help text.

SUPPORT FILES:

Added atomic-rsync to the support dir: a perl script that will transfer some
files using rsync, and then move the updated files into place all at once at
the end of the transfer. Only works when pulling, and uses --link-dest and
a parallel hierarchy of files to effect its update.
Added mnt-excl to the support dir: a perl script that takes the /proc/mounts
file and translates it into a set of excludes that will exclude all mount
points (even mapped mounts to the same disk). The excludes are made relative
to the specified source dir and properly anchored.
Added savetransfer.c to the support dir: a C program that can make a copy of
all the data that flows over the wire. This lets you test for data
corruption (by saving the data on both the sending side and the receiving
side) and provides one way to debug a protocol error.
Added rrsync to the support dir: this is an updated version of Joe Smith's
restricted rsync perl script. This helps to ensure that only certain rsync
commands can be run by an ssh invocation.

INTERNAL:

Added better checking of the checksum-header values that come over the
socket.
Merged a variety of file-deleting functions into a single function so that
it is easier to maintain.
Improved the type of some variables (particularly blocksize vars) for
consistency and proper size.
Got rid of the uint64 type (which we didn't need).
Use a slightly more compatible set of core #include directives.
Defined int32 in a way that ensures that the build dies if we can't find a
variable with at least 32 bits.

PROTOCOL DIFFERENCES FOR VERSION 29:

A 16-bit flag-word is transmitted after every file-list index. This
indicates what is changing between the sender and the receiver. The
generator now transmits an index and a flag-word to indicate when dirs and
symlinks have changed (instead of producing a message), which makes the
outputting of the information more consistent and less prone to screen
corruption (because the local receiver/sender is now outputting all the
file-change info messages).
If a file is being hard-linked, the ITEM_XNAME_FOLLOWS bit is enabled in
the flag-word and the name of the file that was linked immediately follows
in vstring format (see below).
If a file is being transferred with an alternate-basis file, the
ITEM_BASIS_TYPE_FOLLOWS bit is enabled in the flag-word and a single byte
follows, indicating what type of basis file was chosen. If that indicates
that a fuzzy-match was selected, the ITEM_XNAME_FOLLOWS bit is set in the
flag-word and the name of the match in vstring format follows the basis
byte. A vstring is a variable length string that has its size written prior
to the string, and no terminating null. If the string is from 1-127 bytes,
the length is a single byte. If it is from 128-32767 bytes, the length is
written as ((len >> 8) | 0x80) followed by (len % 0x100).
The sending of exclude names is done using filter-rule syntax. This means
that all names have a prefixed rule indicator, even excludes (which used to
be sent as a bare pattern, when possible). The -C option will include the
per-dir .cvsignore merge file in the list of filter rules so it is
positioned correctly (unlike in some older transfer scenarios).
Rsync sorts the filename list in a different way: it sorts the subdir names
after the non-subdir names for each dir's contents, and it always puts a
dir's contents immediately after the dir's name in the list. (Previously an
item named foo.txt would sort in between directory foo/ and foo/bar.)
When talking to a protocol 29 rsync daemon, a list-only request is able to
note this before the options are sent over the wire and the new
--list-only option is included in the options.
When the --stats bytes are sent over the wire (or stored in a batch), they
now include two elapsed-time values: one for how long it took to build the
file-list, and one for how long it took to send it over the wire (each
expressed in thousandths of a second).
When --delete-excluded is specified with some filter rules (AKA excludes),
a client sender will now initiate a send of the rules to the receiver (older
protocols used to omit the sending of excludes in this situation since there
were no receiver-specific rules that survived --delete-excluded back
then). Note that, as with all the filter-list sending, only items that are
significant to the other side will actually be sent over the wire, so the
filter-rule list that is sent in this scenario is often empty.
An index equal to the file-list count is sent as a keep-alive packet from
the generator to the sender, which then forwards it on to the receiver. This
normally invalid index is only a valid keep-alive packet if the 16-bit
flag-word that follows it contains a single bit (ITEM_IS_NEW, which is
normally an illegal flag to appear alone).
A protocol-29 batch file includes a bit for the setting of the --dirs
option and for the setting of the --compress option. Also, the shell
script created by --write-batch will use the --filter option instead of
--exclude-from to capture any filter rules.

BUILD CHANGES:

Handle an operating system that use mkdev() in place of makedev().
Improved configure to better handle cross-compiling.

NEWS for rsync 2.6.3 (30 Sep 2004)

Changes in this version:

SECURITY FIXES:

A bug in the sanitize_path routine (which affects a non-chrooted rsync
daemon) could allow a user to craft a pathname that would get transformed
into an absolute path for certain options (but not for file-transfer names).
If you're running an rsync daemon with chroot disabled, please upgrade,
ESPECIALLY if the user privs you run rsync under is anything above nobody.

OUTPUT CHANGES (ATTN: those using a script to parse the verbose output):
Please note that the 2-line footer (output when verbose) now uses the term
sent instead of wrote and received instead of read. If you are not
parsing the numeric values out of this footer, a script would be better off
using the empty line prior to the footer as the indicator that the verbose
output is over.
The output from the --stats option was similarly affected to change
written to sent and read to received.
Rsync ensures that a filename that contains a newline gets mentioned with
each newline transformed into a question mark (which prevents a filename
from causing an empty line to be output).
The backed up ... message that is output when at least 2 --verbose
options are specified is now the same both with and without the
--backup-dir option.

BUG FIXES:

Fixed a crash bug that might appear when --delete was used and multiple
source directories were specified.
Fixed a 32-bit truncation of the file length when generating the checksums.
The --backup code no longer attempts to create some directories over and
over again (generating warnings along the way).
Fixed a bug in the reading of the secrets file (by the daemon) and the
password file (by the client): the files no longer need to be terminated by
a newline for their content to be read in.
If a file has a read error on the sending side or the reconstructed data
doesn't match the expected checksum (perhaps due to the basis file changing
during the transfer), the receiver will no longer retain the resulting file
unless the --partial option was specified. (Note: for the read-error
detection to work, neither side can be older than 2.6.3 -- older receivers
will always retain the file, and older senders don't tell the receiver that
the file had a read error.)
If a file gets resent in a single transfer and the --backup option is
enabled, rsync no longer performs a duplicate backup (it used to overwrite
the original file in the backup area).
Files specified in the daemon's exclude or exclude from config items are
now excluded from being uploaded (assuming that the module allows uploading
at all) in addition to the old download exclusion.
Got rid of a potential hang in the receiver when near the end of a phase.
When using --backup without a --backup-dir, rsync no longer preserves
the modify time on directories. This avoids confusing NFS.
When --copy-links (-L) is specified, we now output a separate error for
a symlink that has no referent instead of claiming that a file vanished.
The --copy-links (-L) option no longer has the side-effect of telling
the receiving side to follow symlinks. See the --keep-dirlinks option
(mentioned below) for a way to specify that behavior.
Error messages from the daemon server's option-parsing (such as refused
options) are now successfully transferred back to the client (the server
used to fail to send the message because the socket wasn't in the right
state for the message to get through).
Most transfer errors that occur during a daemon transfer are now returned to
the user in addition to being logged (some messages are intended to be
daemon-only and are not affected by this).
Fixed a bug in the daemon authentication code when using one of the
batch-processing options.
We try to work around some buggy IPv6 implementations that fail to implement
IPV6_V6ONLY. This should fix the address in use error that some daemons
get when running on an OS with a buggy IPv6 implementation. Also, if the new
code gets this error, we might suggest that the user specify --ipv4 or
--ipv6 (if we think it will help).
When the remote rsync dies, make a better effort to recover any error
messages it may have sent before dying (the local rsync used to just die
with a socket-write error).
When using --delete and a --backup-dir that contains files that are
hard-linked to their destination equivalents, rsync now makes sure that
removed files really get removed (avoids a really weird rename() behavior).
Avoid a bogus run-time complaint about a lack of 64-bit integers when the
int64 type is defined as an off_t and it actually has 64-bits.
Added a configure check for open64() without mkstemp64() so that we can
avoid using mkstemp() when such a combination is encountered. This bypasses
a problem writing out large temp files on OSes such as AIX and HP-UX.
Fixed an age-old crash problem with --read-batch on a local copy (rsync
was improperly assuming --whole-file for the local copy).
When --dry-run (-n) is used and the destination directory does not
exist, rsync now produces a correct report of files that would be sent
instead of dying with a chdir() error.
Fixed a bug that could cause a slow-to-connect rsync daemon to die with an
error instead of waiting for the connection to finish.
Fixed an ssh interaction that could cause output to be lost when the user
chose to combine the output of rsync's stdout and stderr (e.g. using the
2>&1).
Fixed an option-parsing bug when --files-from got passed to a daemon.

ENHANCEMENTS:

Added the --partial-dir=DIR option that lets you specify where to
(temporarily) put a partially transferred file (instead of overwriting the
destination file). E.g. --partial-dir=.rsync-partial Also added support
for the RSYNC_PARTIAL_DIR environment variable that, when found,
transforms a regular --partial option (such as the convenient -P option)
into one that also specifies a directory.
Added --keep-dirlinks (-K), which allows you to symlink a directory onto
another partition on the receiving side and have rsync treat it as matching
a normal directory from the sender.
Added the --inplace option that tells rsync to write each destination file
without using a temporary file. The matching of existing data in the
destination file can be severely limited by this, but there are also cases
where this is more efficient (such as appending data). Use only when needed
(see the manpage for more details).
Added the write only option for the daemon's config file.
Added long-option names for -4 and -6 (namely --ipv4 and --ipv6) and
documented all these options in the manpage.
Improved the handling of the --bwlimit option so that it's less bursty,
more accurate, and works properly over a larger range of values.
The rsync daemon-over-ssh code now looks for SSH_CONNECTION and
SSH2_CLIENT in addition to SSH_CLIENT to figure out the IP address.
Added the --checksum-seed=N option for advanced users.
Batch writing/reading has a brand-new implementation that is simpler, fixes
a few weird problems with the old code (such as no longer sprinkling the
batch files into different dirs or even onto different systems), and is much
less intrusive into the code (making it easier to maintain for the future).
The new code generates just one data file instead of three, which makes it
possible to read the batch on stdin via a remote shell. Also, the old
requirement of forcing the same fixed checksum-seed for all batch processing
has been removed.
If an rsync daemon has a module set with list = no (which hides its
presence in the list of available modules), a user that fails to
authenticate gets the same unknown module error that they would get if the
module were actually unknown (while still logging the real error to the
daemon's log file). This prevents fishing for module names.
The daemon's refuse options config item now allows you to match option
names using wildcards and/or the single-letter option names.
Each transferred file now gets its permissions and modified-time updated
before the temp-file gets moved into place. Previously, the finished file
would have a very brief window where its permissions disallowed all group
and world access.
Added the ability to parse a literal IPv6 address in an rsync: URL (e.g.
rsync://[2001:638:500:101::21]:873/module/dir).
The daemon's wildcard expanding code can now handle more than 1000 filenames
(it's now limited by memory instead of having a hard-wired limit).

INTERNAL:

Some cleanup in the exclude code has saved some per-exclude memory and made
the code easier to maintain.
Improved the argv-overflow checking for a remote command that has a lot of
args.
Use rsyserr() in the various places that were still calling rprintf() with
strerror() as an arg.
If an rsync daemon is listening on multiple sockets (to handle both IPv4 and
IPv6 to a single port), we now close all the unneeded file handles after we
accept a connection (we used to close just one of them).
Optimized the handling of larger block sizes (rsync used to slow to a crawl
if the block size got too large).
Optimized away a loop in hash_search().
Some improvements to the sanitize_path() and clean_fname() functions
makes them more efficient and produce better results (while still being
compatible with the file-name cleaning that gets done on both sides when
sending the file-list).
Got rid of alloc_sanitize_path() after adding a destination-buffer arg to
sanitize_path() made it possible to put all the former's functionality
into the latter.
The file-list that is output when at least 4 verbose options are specified
reports the uid value on the sender even when rsync is not running as root
(since we might be sending to a root receiver).

BUILD CHANGES:

Added a gen target to rebuild most of the generated files, including
configure, config.h.in, the manpages, and proto.h.
If make proto doesn't find some changes in the prototypes, the proto.h
file is left untouched (its time-stamp used to always be updated).
The variable $STRIP (that is optionally set by the install-strip target's
rule) was changed to $INSTALL_STRIP because some systems have $STRIP
already set in the environment.
Fixed a build problem when SUPPORT_HARD_LINKS isn't defined.
When cross-compiling, the gettimeofday() function is now assumed to be a
modern version that takes two-args (since we can't test it).

The scripts in the testsuite dir were cleaned up a bit and a few new tests
added.
Some new diffs were added to the patches dir, and some accepted ones were
removed.

NEWS for rsync 2.6.2 (30 Apr 2004)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

Fixed a major bug in the sorting of the filenames when --relative is used
for some sources (just sources such as / and /* were affected). This fix
ensures that we ask for the right file-list item when requesting changes
from the sender.
Rsync now checks the return value of the close() function to better report
disk-full problems on an NFS file system.
Restored the old daemon-server behavior of logging error messages rather
than returning them to the user. (A better long-term fix will be sought in
the future.)
An obscure uninitialized-variable bug was fixed in the uid/gid code. (This
bug probably had no ill effects.)

BUILD CHANGES:

Got rid of the configure check for sys/sysctl.h (it wasn't used and was
causing a problem on some systems). Also improved the
broken-largefile-locking test to try to avoid failure due to an NFS
build-dir.
Fixed a compile problem on systems that don't define AI_NUMERICHOST.
Fixed a compile problem in the popt source for compilers that don't support
__attribute__.

Improved the testsuite's merge test to work on OSF1.
Two new diffs were added to the patches dir.

NEWS for rsync 2.6.1 (26 Apr 2004)

Changes in this version:

PROTOCOL NUMBER:

The protocol number was changed to 28.

SECURITY FIXES:

Paths sent to an rsync daemon are more thoroughly sanitized when chroot is
not used. If you're running a non-read-only rsync daemon with chroot
disabled, please upgrade, ESPECIALLY if the user privs you run rsync
under is anything above nobody.

ENHANCEMENTS:

Lower memory use, more optimal transfer of data over the socket, and lower
CPU usage (see the INTERNAL section for details).
The RSYNC_PROXY environment variable can now contain a USER:PASS@ prefix
before the HOST:PORT information. (Bardur Arantsson)
The --progress output now mentions how far along in the transfer we are,
including both a count of files transferred and a percentage of the total
file-count that we've processed. It also shows better
current-rate-of-transfer and remaining-transfer-time values.
Documentation changes now attempt to describe some often misunderstood
features more clearly.

BUG FIXES:

When -x (--one-file-system) is combined with -L (--copy-links) or
--copy-unsafe-links, no symlinked files are skipped, even if the referent
file is on a different filesystem.
The --link-dest code now works properly for a non-root user when (1) the
UIDs of the source and destination differ and -o was specified, or (2)
when the group of the source can't be used on the destination and -g was
specified.
Fixed a bug in the handling of -H (hard-links) that might cause the
expanded PATH/NAME value of the current item to get overwritten (due to an
expanded-name caching bug).
We now reset the new data has been sent flag at the start of each file we
send. This makes sure that an interrupted transfer with the --partial
option set doesn't keep a shorter temp file than the current basis file when
no new data has been transferred over the wire for that file.
Fixed a byte-order problem in --batch-mode on big-endian machines. (Jay
Fenlason)
When using --cvs-exclude, the exclude items we get from a per-directory's
.cvsignore file once again only affect that one directory (not all following
directories too). The items are also now properly word-split and parsed
without any +/- prefix parsing.
When specifying the USER@HOST: prefix for a file, the USER part can now
contain an '@', if needed (i.e. the last '@' is used to find the HOST, not
the first).
Fixed some bugs in the handling of group IDs for non-root users: (1) It
properly handles a group that the sender didn't have a name for (it would
previously skip changing the group on any files in that group). (2) If
--numeric-ids is used, rsync no longer attempts to set groups that the
user doesn't have the permission to set.
Fixed the refuse options setting in the rsyncd.conf file.
Improved the -x (--one-file-system) flag's handling of any mount-point
directories we encounter. It is both more optimal (in that it no longer does
a useless scan of the contents of the mount-point dirs) and also fixes a
bug where a remapped mount of the original filesystem could get discovered
in a subdir we should be ignoring.
Rsync no longer discards a double-slash at the start of a filename when
trying to open the file. It also no longer constructs names that start with
a double slash (unless the user supplied them).
Path-specifying options to a daemon should now work the same with or without
chroot turned on. Previously, such a option (such as --link-dest) would
get its absolute path munged into a relative one if chroot was not on,
making that setting fairly useless. Rsync now transforms the path into one
that is based on the module's base dir when chroot is not enabled.
Fixed a compatibility problem interacting with older rsync versions that
might send us an empty --suffix value without telling us that
--backup-dir was specified.
The hosts allow option for a daemon-over-remote-shell process now has
improved support for IPv6 addresses and a fix for systems that have a length
field in their socket structs.
Fixed the ability to request an empty backup --suffix when sending files
to an rsync daemon.
Fixed an option-parsing bug when --files-from was sent to a server sender.

INTERNAL:

Most of the I/O is now buffered, which results in a pretty large speedup
when running under MS Windows. (Craig Barratt)
Optimizations to the name-handling/comparing code have made some significant
reductions in user-CPU time for large file sets.
Some cleanup of the variable types make the code more consistent.
Reduced memory requirements of hard link preservation. (J.W. Schultz)
Implemented a new algorithm for hard-link handling that speeds up the code
significantly. (J.W. Schultz and Wayne Davison)
The --hard-link option now uses the first existing file in the group of
linked files as the basis for the transfer. This prevents the sub-optimal
transfer of a file's data when a new hardlink is added on the sending side
and it sorts alphabetically earlier in the list than the files that are
already present on the receiving side.
Dropped support for protocol versions less than 20 (2.3.0 released 15 Mar
1999) and activated warnings for protocols less than 25 (2.5.0 released 23
Aug 2001). (Wayne Davison and J.W. Schultz, severally)
More optimal data transmission for --hard-links (protocol 28).
More optimal data transmission for --checksum (protocol 28).
Less memory is used when --checksum is specified.
Less memory is used in the file list (a per-file savings).
The generator is now better about not modifying the file list during the
transfer in order to avoid a copy-on-write memory bifurcation (on systems
where fork() uses shared memory). Previously, rsync's shared memory would
slowly become unshared, resulting in real memory usage nearly doubling on
the receiving side by the end of the transfer. Now, as long as permissions
are being preserved, the shared memory should remain that way for the entire
transfer.
Changed hardlink info and file_struct + strings to use allocation pools.
This reduces memory use for large file-sets and permits freeing memory to
the OS. (J.W. Schultz)
The 2 pipes used between the receiver and generator processes (which are
forked on the same machine) were reduced to 1 pipe and the protocol improved
so that (1) it is now impossible to have the redo pipe fill up and hang
rsync, and (2) trailing messages from the receiver don't get lost on their
way through the generator over to the sender (which mainly affected
hard-link messages and verbose --stats output).
Improved the internal uid/gid code to be more portable and a little more
optimized.
The device numbers sent when using --devices are now sent as separate
major/minor values with 32-bit accuracy (protocol 28). Previously, the
copied devices were sent as a single 32-bit number. This will make
inter-operation of 64-bit binaries more compatible with their 32-bit
brethren (with both ends of the connection are using protocol 28). Note that
optimizations in the binary protocol for sending the device numbers often
results in fewer bytes being used than before, even though more precision is
now available.
Some cleanup of the exclude/include structures and its code made things
clearer (internally), simpler, and more efficient.
The reading & writing of the file-list in batch-mode is now handled by the
same code that sends & receives the list over the wire. This makes it much
easier to maintain. (Note that the batch code is still considered to be
experimental.)

BUILD CHANGES:

The configure script now accepts --with-rsyncd-conf=PATH to override the
default value of the /etc/rsyncd.conf file.
Fixed configure bug when running ./configure --disable-ipv6.
Fixed compilation problem on Tru64 Unix (having to do with sockaddr.sa_len
and sockaddr.sin_len).

Fixed make test bug when build dir is not the source dir.
Added a couple extra diffs in the patches dir, removed the ones that got
applied, and rebuilt the rest.

NEWS for rsync 2.6.0 (1 Jan 2004)

Changes in this version:

PROTOCOL NUMBER:

The protocol number was changed to 27. The maximum accepted protocol number
was increased from 30 to 40.

ENHANCEMENTS:

ssh is now the default remote shell for rsync. If you want to change this,
configure like this: ./configure --with-rsh=rsh.
Added --files-from, --no-relative, --no-implied-dirs, and --from0.
Note that --from0 affects the line-ending character for all the files read
by the --*-from options. (Wayne Davison)
Length of csum2 is now per-file starting with protocol version
27. (J.W. Schultz)
Per-file dynamic block size is now sqrt(file length). The per-file checksum
size is determined according to an algorithm provided by Donovan Baarda
which reduces the probability of rsync algorithm corrupting data and falling
back using the whole md4 checksums. (J.W. Schultz, Donovan Baarda)
The --stats option no longer includes the (debug) malloc summary unless
the verbose option was specified at least twice.
Added a new error/warning code for when files vanish from the sending side.
Made vanished source files not interfere with the file-deletion pass when
--delete-after was specified.
Various trailing-info sections are now preceded by a newline.

BUG FIXES:

Fixed several exclude/include matching bugs when using wild-cards. This has
a several user-visible effects, all of which make the matching more
consistent and intuitive. This should hopefully not cause anyone problems
since it makes the matching work more like what people are expecting. (Wayne
Davison)
A pattern with a ** no longer causes a * to match slashes. For example,
with /*/foo/**, foo must be 2 levels deep. [If your string has BOTH *
and ** wildcards, changing the * wildcards to ** will provide the old
behavior in all versions.]
**/foo now matches at the base of the transfer (like /foo does). [Use
/**/foo to get the old behavior in all versions.]
A non-anchored wildcard term floats to match beyond the base of the
transfer. E.g. CVS/R* matches at the end of the path, just like the
non-wildcard term CVS/Root does. [Use /CVS/R* to get the old behavior in
all versions.]
Including a ** in the match term causes it to be matched against the
entire path, not just the name portion, even if there aren't any interior
slashes in the term. E.g. foo**bar would exclude /path/foo-bar (just
like before) as well as /foo-path/baz-bar (unlike before). [Use foo*bar
to get the old behavior in all versions.]
The exclude list specified in the daemon's config file is now properly
applied to the pulled items no matter how deep the user's file-args are in
the source tree. (Wayne Davison)
For protocol version >= 27, mdfour_tail() is called when the block size
(including checksum_seed) is a multiple of 64. Previously it was not
called, giving the wrong MD4 checksum. (Craig Barratt)
For protocol version >= 27, a 64 bit bit counter is used in mdfour.c as
required by the RFC. Previously only a 32 bit bit counter was used, causing
incorrect MD4 file checksums for file sizes >= 512MB - 4. (Craig Barratt)
Fixed a crash bug when interacting with older rsync versions and multiple
files of the same name are destined for the same dir. (Wayne Davison)
Keep tmp names from overflowing MAXPATHLEN.
Make --link-dest honor the absence of -p, -o, and -g.
Made rsync treat a trailing slash in the destination in a more consistent
manner.
Fixed file I/O error detection. (John Van Essen)
Fixed bogus malformed address {hostname} message in rsyncd log when
checking IP address against hostnames from hosts allow and hosts deny
parameters in config file.
Print heap statistics when verbose >= 2 instead of when >= 1.
Fixed a compression (-z) bug when syncing a mostly-matching file that
contains already-compressed data. (Yasuoka Masahiko and Wayne Davison)
Fixed a bug in the --backup code that could cause deleted files to not get
backed up.
When the backup code makes new directories, create them with mode 0700
instead of 0755 (since the directory permissions in the backup tree are not
yet copied from the main tree).
Call setgroups() in a more portable manner.
Improved file-related error messages to better indicate exactly what
pathname failed. (Wayne Davison)
Fixed some bugs in the handling of --delete and --exclude when using the
--relative (-R) option. (Wayne Davison)
Fixed bug that prevented regular files from replacing special files and
caused a directory in --link-dest or --compare-dest to block the
creation of a file with the same path. A directory still cannot be replaced
by a regular file unless --delete specified. (J.W. Schultz)
Detect and report when open or opendir succeed but read and readdir fail
caused by network filesystem issues and truncated files. (David Norwood,
Michael Brown, J.W. Schultz)
Added a fix that should give ssh time to restore the tty settings if the
user presses Ctrl-C at an ssh password prompt.

INTERNAL:

Eliminated vestigial support for old versions that we stopped supporting.
(J.W. Schultz)
Simplified some of the option-parsing code. (Wayne Davison)
Some cleanup made to the exclude code, as well as some new defines added to
enhance readability. (Wayne Davison)
Changed the protocol-version code so that it can interact at a lower
protocol level than the maximum supported by both sides. Added an
undocumented option, --protocol=N, to force the value we advertise to the
other side (primarily for testing purposes). (Wayne Davison)

NEWS for rsync 2.5.7 (4 Dec 2003)

Changes in this version:

SECURITY FIXES:

Fix buffer handling bugs. (Andrew Tridgell, Martin Pool, Paul Russell,
Andrea Barisani)

NEWS for rsync 2.5.6, aka "the dwd-between-jobs release" (26 Jan 2003)

Changes in this version:

ENHANCEMENTS:

The --delete-after option now implies --delete. (Wayne Davison)
The --suffix option can now be used with --backup-dir. (Michael
Zimmerman)
Combining :: syntax with the --rsh/-e option now uses the specified
remote-shell as a transport to talk to a (newly-spawned) server-daemon. This
allows someone to use daemon features, such as modules, over a secure
protocol, such as ssh. (JD Paul)
The rsync:// syntax for daemon connections is now accepted in the
destination field.
If the file name given to --include-from or --exclude-from is -, rsync
will read from standard input. (J.W. Schultz)
New option --link-dest which is like --compare-dest except that
unchanged files are hard-linked in to the destination directory. (J.W.
Schultz)
Don't report an error if an excluded file disappears during an rsync run.
(Eugene Chupriyanov and Bo Kersey)
Added .svn to --cvs-exclude list to support subversion. (Jon Middleton)
Properly support IPv6 addresses in the rsyncd.conf hosts allow and hosts deny fields. (Hideaki Yoshifuji)
Changed exclude file handling to permit DOS or MAC style line terminations.
(J.W. Schultz)
Ignore errors from chmod when -p/-a/--preserve-perms is not set.
(Dave Dykstra)

BUG FIXES:

Fix forward name lookup failed errors on AIX 4.3.3. (John L. Allen, Martin
Pool)
Generate each file's rolling-checksum data as we send it, not in a separate
(memory-eating) pass before hand. This prevents timeout errors on really
large files. (Stefan Nehlsen)
Fix compilation on Tru64. (Albert Chin, Zoong Pham)
Better handling of some client-server errors. (Martin Pool)
Fixed a crash that would occur when sending a list of files that contains a
duplicate name (if it sorts to the end of the file list) and using
--delete. (Wayne Davison)
Fixed the file-name duplicate-removal code when dealing with multiple dups
in a row. (Wayne Davison)
Fixed a bug that caused rsync to lose the exit status of its child processes
and sometimes return an exit code of 0 instead of showing an error. (David
R. Staples, Dave Dykstra)
Fixed bug in --copy-unsafe-links that caused it to be completely broken.
(Dave Dykstra)
Prevent infinite recursion in cleanup code under certain circumstances.
(Sviatoslav Sviridov and Marc Espie)
Fixed a bug that prevented rsync from creating intervening directories when
--relative-paths/-R is set. (Craig Barratt)
Prevent Connection reset by peer messages from Cygwin. (Randy O'Meara)

INTERNAL:

Many code cleanups and improved internal documentation. (Martin Pool, Nelson
Beebe)
Portability fixes. (Dave Dykstra and Wayne Davison)
More test cases. (Martin Pool)
Some test-case fixes. (Brian Poole, Wayne Davison)
Updated included popt to the latest vendor drop, version 1.6.4. (Jos
Backus)
Updated config.guess and config.sub to latest versions; this means rsync
should build on more platforms. (Paul Green)

NEWS for rsync 2.5.5, aka Snowy River (2 Apr 2002)

Changes in this version:

ENHANCEMENTS:

With --progress, when a transfer is complete show the time taken;
otherwise show expected time to complete. (Cameron Simpson)
Make make install-strip works properly, and make install accepts a
DESTDIR variable for help in building binary packages. (Peter
Breitenlohner, Greg Louis)
If configured with --enable-maintainer-mode, then on receipt of a fatal
signal rsync will try to open an xterm running gdb, similarly to Samba's
panic action or GNOME's bug-buddy. (Martin Pool)

BUG FIXES:

Fix situation where failure to fork (e.g. because out of process slots)
would cause rsync to kill all processes owned by the current user. Yes,
really! (Paul Haas, Martin Pool)
Fix test suite on Solaris. (Jos Backus, Martin Pool)
Fix minor memory leak in socket code. (Dave Dykstra, Martin Pool.)
Fix --whole-file problem that caused it to be the default even for remote
connections. (Martin Pool, Frank Schulz)
Work around bug in Mac OS X mkdir(2), which cannot handle trailing slashes.
http://www.opensource.apple.com/bugs/X/BSD%20Kernel/2734739.html (Martin
Pool)
Improved network error handling. (Greg A. Woods)

NEWS for rsync 2.5.4, aka "Imitation lizard skin" (13 Mar 2002)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

Additional fix for zlib double-free bug. (Martin Pool, Andrew Tridgell) (CVE
CAN-2002-0059)

ENHANCEMENTS:

Merge in changes from zlib 1.1.3 to zlib 1.1.4. (Jos Backus) (Note that
rsync still uses a custom version of zlib; you can not just link against a
system library. See zlib/README.rsync)
Additional test cases for --compress. (Martin Pool)

NEWS for rsync 2.5.3, aka "Happy 26" (11 Mar 2002)

Changes in this version:

SECURITY FIXES:

Make sure that supplementary groups are removed from a server
process after changing uid and gid. (Ethan Benson) (Debian bug
#132272, CVE CAN-2002-0080)

BUG FIXES:

Fix zlib double-free bug. (Owen Taylor, Mark J Cox) (CVE CAN-2002-0059)
Fixed problem that in many cases caused the error message unexpected read
size of 0 in map_ptr and resulted in the wrong data being copied.
Fixed compilation errors on some systems caused by the use of unsigned int64 in rsync.h.
Fixed problem on systems such as Sunos4 that do not support realloc on a
NULL pointer; error was 'out of memory in "flist_expand"'.
Fix for rsync server processes hanging around after the client unexpectedly
disconnects. (Colin Walters) (Debian bug #128632)
Cope with BSD systems on which mkdir() will not accept a trailing slash.

ENHANCEMENTS:

Merge in changes from zlib 1.1.2 to zlib 1.1.3. (Note that rsync still uses
a custom version of zlib; you can not just link against a system library.
See zlib/README.rsync)
Command to initiate connections is only shown with -vv, rather than -v
as in 2.5.2. Output from plain -v is more similar to what was historically
used so as not to break scripts that try to parse the output.
Added --no-whole-file and --no-blocking-io options (Dave Dykstra)
Made the --write-batch and --read-batch options actually work and added
documentation in the manpage (Jos Backus)
If the daemon is unable to fork a child to accept a connection, print an
error message. (Colin Walters)

NEWS for rsync 2.5.2 (26 Jan 2002)

Changes in this version:

SECURITY FIXES:

Signedness security patch from Sebastian Krahmer krahmer@suse.de -- in
some cases we were not sufficiently careful about reading integers from the
network.

PROTOCOL NUMBER:

The protocol number was changed to 26.

BUG FIXES:

Fix possible string mangling in log files.
Fix for setting local address of outgoing sockets.
Better handling of hardlinks and devices on platforms with 64-bit dev_t or
ino_t.
Name resolution on machines supporting IPv6 is improved.
Fix for device nodes. (dann frazier) (Debian #129135)

ENHANCEMENTS:

With -v, rsync now shows the command used to initiate an ssh/rsh
connection.
--statistics now shows memory heap usage on platforms that support
mallinfo().
"The Ted T'so school of program optimization": make progress visible and
people will think it's faster. (With --progress, rsync will show you how
many files it has seen as it builds the file_list, giving some indication
that it has not hung.)
Improvements to batch mode support. This is still experimental but testing
would be welcome. (Jos Backus)
New --ignore-existing option, patch previously distributed with Vipul's
Razor. (Debian #124286)

NEWS for rsync 2.5.1 (3 Jan 2002)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

Fix for segfault in --daemon mode configuration parser. (Paul Mackerras)
Correct string<->address parsing for both IPv4 and 6. (YOSHIFUJI Hideaki,
SUMIKAWA Munechika and Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino)
Various fixes for IPv6 support. (Dave Dykstra)
rsync.1 typo fix. (Matt Kraai)
Test suite typo fixes. (Tom Schmidt)
rsync.1 grammar and clarity improvements. (Edward Welbourne)
Correction to ./configure tests for inet_ntop. (Jeff Garzik)

ENHANCEMENTS:

--progress and -P now show estimated data transfer rate (in a multiple
of bytes/s) and estimated time to completion. (Rik Faith)
--no-detach option, required to run as a W32 service and also useful when
running on Unix under daemontools, AIX's SRC, or a debugger. (Max Bowsher,
Jos Backus)
Clearer error messages for some conditions.

NEWS for rsync 2.5.0 (30 Nov 2001)

Changes in this version:

PROTOCOL NUMBER:

The protocol number was changed to 25.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Martin Pool mbp@samba.org is now a co-maintainer.

NEW FEATURES:

Support for LSB-compliant packaging http://www.linuxbase.org/
Shell wildcards are allowed in auth users lines.
Merged UNC rsync+ patch to support creation of standalone patch sets. By
Bert J. Dempsey and Debra Weiss, updated by Jos Backus.
http://www.ils.unc.edu/i2dsi/unc_rsync+.html
IPv6 support based on a patch from KAME.net, on systems including modern
versions of Linux, Solaris, and HP-UX. Also includes IPv6 compatibility
functions for old OSs by the Internet Software Consortium, Paul Vixie, the
OpenSSH portability project, and OpenBSD.

ENHANCEMENTS:

Include/exclude cluestick: with -vv, print out whether files are included
or excluded and why.
Many error messages have more friendly explanations and more details.
Manual page improvements plus scanty protocol documentation.
When running as --daemon in the background and using a log file
rsyncd.conf directive, close the log file every time it is open when going
to sleep on the socket. This allows the log file to get cleaned out by
another process.
Change to using libpopt rather than getopt for processing options. This
makes the code cleaner and the behaviour more consistent across platforms.
popt is included and built if not installed on the platform.
More details in --version, including note about whether 64-bit files,
symlinks and hardlinks are supported.
MD4 code may use less CPU cycles.
Use mkstemp on systems where it is secure. If we use mktemp, explain that we
do it in a secure way.
--whole-file is the default when source and target are on the local
machine.

BUG FIXES:

Fix for various bugs causing rsync to hang.
Attempt to fix Large File Summit support on AIX.
Attempt to fix error handling lockup bug.
Give a non-0 exit code if any of the files we have been asked to
transfer fail to transfer.
For log messages containing ridiculously long strings that might overflow a
buffer rsync no longer aborts, but rather prints an ellipsis at the end of
the string. (Patch from Ed Santiago.)

PLATFORMS:

Improved support for UNICOS (tested on Cray T3E and Cray SV1)
autoconf2.52 (or later) is now required to rebuild the autoconf scripts. It
is not required to simply build rsync.
Platforms thought to work in this release:
- Cray SV1 UNICOS 10.0.0.8 cc
- Debian Linux 2.2 UltraSparc gcc
- Debian Linux testing/unstable ARM gcc
- FreeBSD 3.3-RELEASE i386 cc
- FreeBSD 4.1.1-RELEASE i386 cc
- FreeBSD 4.3-STABLE i386 cc
- HP PA-RISC HP-UX 10.20 gcc
- HP PA-RISC HP-UX 11.11 cc
- IRIX 6.5 MIPS cc
- IRIX 6.5 MIPS gcc
- Mac OS X PPC (--disable-ipv6) cc
- NetBSD 1.5 i386 gcc
- NetBSD Current i386 cc
- OpenBSD 2.5 Sparc gcc
- OpenBSD 2.9 i386 cc
- OpenBSD Current i386 cc
- RedHat 6.2 i386 gcc
- RedHat 6.2 i386 insure++
- RedHat 7.0 i386 gcc
- RedHat 7.1 i386 (Kernel 2.4.10) gcc
- Slackware 8.0 i686 (Kernel 2.4.10)
- Solaris 8 UltraSparc cc
- Solaris 8 UltraSparc gcc
- Solaris 8 i386 gcc
- SuSE 7.1 i386 gcc2.95.2
- SuSE 7.1 ppc gcc2.95.2
- i386-pc-sco3.2v5.0.5 cc
- i386-pc-sco3.2v5.0.5 gcc
- powerpc-ibm-aix4.3.3.0 cc
- i686-unknown-sysv5UnixWare7.1.0 gcc
- i686-unknown-sysv5UnixWare7.1.0 cc

TESTING:

The existing test.sh script by Phil Hands has been merged into a
test framework that works from both make check and the Samba
build farm.

Partial Protocol History

RELEASE DATE	VER.	DATE OF COMMIT*	PROTOCOL
16 Jan 2025	3.4.1		32
15 Jan 2025	3.4.0		32
06 Apr 2024	3.3.0		31
20 Oct 2022	3.2.7		31
09 Sep 2022	3.2.6		31
14 Aug 2022	3.2.5		31
15 Apr 2022	3.2.4		31
06 Aug 2020	3.2.3		31
04 Jul 2020	3.2.2		31
22 Jun 2020	3.2.1		31
19 Jun 2020	3.2.0		31
28 Jan 2018	3.1.3		31
21 Dec 2015	3.1.2		31
22 Jun 2014	3.1.1		31
28 Sep 2013	3.1.0	31 Aug 2008	31
23 Sep 2011	3.0.9		30
26 Mar 2011	3.0.8		30
31 Dec 2009	3.0.7		30
08 May 2009	3.0.6		30
28 Dec 2008	3.0.5		30
06 Sep 2008	3.0.4		30
29 Jun 2008	3.0.3		30
08 Apr 2008	3.0.2		30
03 Apr 2008	3.0.1		30
01 Mar 2008	3.0.0	11 Nov 2006	30
06 Nov 2006	2.6.9		29
22 Apr 2006	2.6.8		29
11 Mar 2006	2.6.7		29
28 Jul 2005	2.6.6		29
01 Jun 2005	2.6.5		29
30 Mar 2005	2.6.4	17 Jan 2005	29
30 Sep 2004	2.6.3		28
30 Apr 2004	2.6.2		28
26 Apr 2004	2.6.1	08 Jan 2004	28
01 Jan 2004	2.6.0	10 Apr 2003	27 (MAX=40)
04 Dec 2003	2.5.7		26
26 Jan 2003	2.5.6		26
02 Apr 2002	2.5.5		26
13 Mar 2002	2.5.4		26
11 Mar 2002	2.5.3		26
26 Jan 2002	2.5.2	11 Jan 2002	26
03 Jan 2002	2.5.1		25
30 Nov 2001	2.5.0	23 Aug 2001	25
06 Sep 2000	2.4.6		24
19 Aug 2000	2.4.5		24
29 Jul 2000	2.4.4		24
09 Apr 2000	2.4.3		24
30 Mar 2000	2.4.2		24
30 Jan 2000	2.4.1	29 Jan 2000	24
29 Jan 2000	2.4.0	28 Jan 2000	23
25 Jan 2000	2.3.3	23 Jan 2000	22
08 Nov 1999	2.3.2	26 Jun 1999	21
06 Apr 1999	2.3.1		20
15 Mar 1999	2.3.0	15 Mar 1999	20
25 Nov 1998	2.2.1		19
03 Nov 1998	2.2.0		19
09 Sep 1998	2.1.1		19
20 Jul 1998	2.1.0		19
17 Jul 1998	2.0.19		19
18 Jun 1998	2.0.17		19
01 Jun 1998	2.0.16		19
27 May 1998	2.0.13	27 May 1998	19
26 May 1998	2.0.12		18
22 May 1998	2.0.11		18
18 May 1998	2.0.9	18 May 1998	18
17 May 1998	2.0.8		17
15 May 1998	2.0.1		17
14 May 1998	2.0.0		17
17 Apr 1998	1.7.4		17
13 Apr 1998	1.7.3		17
05 Apr 1998	1.7.2		17
26 Mar 1998	1.7.1		17
26 Mar 1998	1.7.0	26 Mar 1998	17 (MAX=30)
13 Jan 1998	1.6.9	13 Jan 1998	15 (MAX=20)

* DATE OF COMMIT is the date the protocol change was committed to version
control.

@USE_GFM_PARSER@

NEWS for rsync 3.4.1 (16 Jan 2025)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

DEVELOPER RELATED:

NEWS for rsync 3.4.0 (15 Jan 2025)

Changes in this version:

PROTOCOL NUMBER:

SECURITY FIXES:

BUG FIXES:

INTERNAL:

DEVELOPER RELATED:

NEWS for rsync 3.3.0 (6 Apr 2024)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

ENHANCEMENTS:

DEVELOPER RELATED:

NEWS for rsync 3.2.7 (20 Oct 2022)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

ENHANCEMENTS:

PACKAGING RELATED:

NEWS for rsync 3.2.6 (9 Sep 2022)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

ENHANCEMENTS:

PACKAGING RELATED:

DEVELOPER RELATED:

NEWS for rsync 3.2.5 (14 Aug 2022)

Changes in this version:

SECURITY FIXES:

BUG FIXES:

ENHANCEMENTS:

PACKAGING RELATED:

DEVELOPER RELATED:

NEWS for rsync 3.2.4 (15 Apr 2022)

Changes in this version:

BEHAVIOR CHANGES:

SECURITY FIXES:

BUG FIXES:

ENHANCEMENTS:

PACKAGING RELATED:

DEVELOPER RELATED:

INTERNAL

NEWS for rsync 3.2.3 (6 Aug 2020)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

ENHANCEMENTS:

INTERNAL:

NEWS for rsync 3.2.2 (4 Jul 2020)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

ENHANCEMENTS:

PACKAGING RELATED:

DEVELOPER RELATED:

NEWS for rsync 3.2.1 (22 Jun 2020)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

ENHANCEMENTS:

PACKAGING RELATED:

NEWS for rsync 3.2.0 (19 Jun 2020)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES:

ENHANCEMENTS:

PACKAGING RELATED:

DEVELOPER RELATED:

NEWS for rsync 3.1.3 (28 Jan 2018)

Changes in this version:

SECURITY FIXES:

BUG FIXES:

ENHANCEMENTS:

DEVELOPER RELATED:

NEWS for rsync 3.1.2 (21 Dec 2015)

Changes in this version:

SECURITY FIXES:

BUG FIXES:

ENHANCEMENTS:

DEVELOPER RELATED:

NEWS for rsync 3.1.1 (22 Jun 2014)

Changes in this version:

BUG FIXES: