[Dovecot] backup dovecot

[Benjamin R. Haskell]

On Mon, 26 Nov 2007, Ivan Shmakov wrote:

>>>>>> Benjamin R Haskell <dovecot at benizi.com> writes:
>
> [...]
>
> > And something to watch out for as a new rsync user:
>
> > The trailing slash is important on the source path. From the rsync 'man'
> > page (read it!): A trailing slash on the source changes this behavior to
> > avoid creating an additional directory level at the destination.
>
> 	To put it short, SRC-DIR refers to a directory, and SRC-DIR/ --
> 	to its contents.

That always seemed like an odd way to put it. Saying "its contents" 
implies (or at least leads me to suspect) that SRC-DIR/ would be 
synonymous with SRC-DIR/* But, it's not. The former updates the 
permissions/attributes on DEST-DIR, but the latter doesn't.

Illustration by example, (now that we're way off topic) :-)

$ mkdir foo
$ cd foo
$ umask 077
$ mkdir -p sa/sb
$ echo foo > sa/sb/sc
$ chmod 770 sa
$ mkdir with-slash without-slash with-star
$ rsync -av sa without-slash
$ rsync -av sa/ with-slash
$ rsync -av sa/* with-star
$ tree -p -L 2
.
|-- [drwxrwx---]  sa
|   `-- [drwx------]  sb
|-- [drwxrwx---]  with-slash
|   `-- [drwx------]  sb
|-- [drwx------]  with-star
|   `-- [drwx------]  sb
`-- [drwx------]  without-slash
     `-- [drwxrwx---]  sa

The important bits:
No 'sa' directory in with-slash or with-star.
Permissions on with-slash are the same as 'sa', but with-star doesn't 
match.

Best,
Ben