Hi there,

how can I find out whether a file is still being written? How can I tell rsync not to copy files which are still being written?

Thanks to some great tutorials around I managed to set up a rsync cron job, backuping files from a very remote machine to my computer. Now, on the remote machine there's a program running which writes data out in files and also, once in a while, creates a new file, closing the old one. I would like to copy only closed files, i.e. files that are not being written into any more. Otherwise I'd copy lots of data many times: As long as the file is still written, and a last time only once the file is closed. That's not what I want since the connection is very slow. Any ideas?

Thank you already in advance!

Cheers,
bkeeper

rsync is intelligent though. If you copy files once, it should only copy the incremental changes. Check the man page for many options rsync has. Although I don't recall an option to only copy files that are not opened by any process, you could either copy files with a particular timestamp or older or possibly write a script that uses lsof to search for open files and not include such files in the current rsync copy.

Hi Trickykid,

yes, you're right, how nice! I just tried it out and it works, only copying incremental changes, perfect!

Thanks for the help!

Cheers,
bkeeper