Help Needed With Unison And Symbolic Links

jlacroix · 07-15-2008, 11:00 PM

I have set up Unison to sync my Desktop and Laptop. It's working fine, except for one problem.

On my desktop, I dual boot Windows XP (because I am stuck with a Zune) and Ubuntu. My music files are all on my XP side for my Zune. On my Linux side, I have a symbolic link that points to the music files on my Windows side so that both my Ubuntu and Windows sides both have the exact same Music files.

On my laptop, it's Ubuntu only, no symbolic links.

The problem:
Today I set up Unison to synchronize my Ubuntu music files too. I haven't ran Unison to sync my music files yet. When I previewed the changes, it wants to create the symbolic link from my Desktop to my laptop. I do not want this. I want my /home/jeremy/Music folder to be treated as a directory in Unison so it syncs my files, not a symbolic link.

Here is the configuration file I am using for Unison:

Code:

### ROOT SYNC PATHS ###
 
# first root is my home directory on this laptop
root = /home/jeremy/
 
# second directory is my desktop's home folder over SSH
root = ssh://jeremy@**IP ADDRESS HIDDEN**//home/jeremy/
 
### PATHS TO SYNCHRONIZE ###
 
# gaim/pidgin IM client logs and settings
path = .purple/

# Personal folders
path = Shared/
path = Pictures/
path = Videos/
path = Music/
path = Documents/
path = Roms/
path = .zsnes/
path = Themes/
 
### IGNORE RULES ###
 
# ignore archived backups
#ignore = Path websites/archive/*

I hope I explained it good enough. In summary, my Ubuntu music folder is a symbolic link to C:/Documents and settings/jeremy/My Music on my Windows side, but I don't want it to be seen as a symbolic link to Unison.

Thanks!

jlacroix · 07-16-2008, 02:47 AM

Anyone?

fragos · 07-16-2008, 08:59 PM

I've taken a slightly different approach. I mount my laptop folder on my desktop and then use unison to synchronize my desktop folder with the mounted laptop folder. The unison configuration thinks it's syncing two local folders.

jlacroix · 07-16-2008, 09:20 PM

Well I found some info, although this is still not solved.

Apparently this section of the Unison manual deals with what I'm up against:

Quote:

Ordinarily, Unison treats symbolic links in Unix replicas as “opaque”: it considers the contents of the link to be just the string specifying where the link points, and it will propagate changes in this string to the other replica.

It is sometimes useful to treat a symbolic link “transparently,” acting as though whatever it points to were physically in the replica at the point where the symbolic link appears. To tell Unison to treat a link in this manner, add a line of the form

follow = pathspec

to the profile, where pathspec is a path pattern as described in the Path Patterns section.

However, that makes absolutely no sense to me. Where am I supposed to put "follow = pathspec" and what the heck is a pathspec? I tried a ton of things, for example "follow = /home/jeremy/Music" and nothing works at all.

Hopefully one of you can read the quoted part of the manual above and translate it to me so I know where to put that and what to put for pathspec.

jlacroix · 07-17-2008, 12:05 AM

I think I figured it out. I'll repost if not.

wkretzsch · 10-30-2011, 07:06 AM

Just so everybody else knows who comes across these posts:

From what I've gathered, the correct syntax for solving this problem in a unix bash shell would be:

Code:

unison -follow 'Path mysymlink/Path'