how to use rsync to update date/time only
 

Hi, everybody. I've 2 machines and I rsync data from a->b. I accidentally reset the modification times (recursively) on the entire /home/user directory on A. Now, whenever I try to rsync a->b it wants to rsync everything, since every file on A has now become older than the exact same file on B. Switching to checksum-based rsyncing is not an option because it literally takes over 8 days to process the files.

I'm thinking there's got to be a way to use rsync to go b->a, setting all the modification datetime on A to match those on B.

Any way to do that?

Thanks in advance..

Since rsync uses the timestamp and filesize to determine what has to be transferred, transferring only the timestamp would be a nonsensical operation for rsync.

You'll need to create a script to reset the timestamps on the files, using an ls/find output from the source system as a data source. You can reset a file's modification timestamp with the touch command.

yea, that's what I figured.

thx.