rsync file by newest date

investmentbnker75 · 10-11-2008, 05:58 PM

All, i need to rsync a file by the newest date stamp over ssh. The format of the file looks like:
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user 87 Sept 15 19:59 test.log.2008-09-15

Ive hear you can use find and mtime and then pipe it to rsync. If anyone has an idea how to do this and can give me an example command to use it would be very much appreciated.

Thanks!

chrism01 · 10-11-2008, 07:47 PM

if you only have logfiles in that dir and only one per day, then you should be able to use ls, head

ls -t|head -1

otherwise you could use find + mtime. See man find.

investmentbnker75 · 10-11-2008, 09:32 PM

Thanks Chris but i was looking for the rsync command, i know how to ls them command line.

chrism01 · 10-11-2008, 09:55 PM

Well, rsync automatically updates/copies any file that has changed/is newer than the corresponding target area, so it should take care or that automatically for you.
One of the main points of rsync is that it only sends differences (by default), so if you have a dir full of logfiles it'll only send the new one(s). You don't have to specify that restriction yourself...

Does that help?

billymayday · 10-11-2008, 10:03 PM

I'm not sure how to do it with find (I assume you are wanting the only the single most recent file in the directory rsync'ed?)

I like Chris's method. Here's what I did (bu I'm sure you could be slicker:

Code:

latest=`ls -t|head -1` ; rsync $latest ~/temp

Where ~/temp was simply the destination for my test run.

Edit - sorry - was playing with a solution while Chris posted.

investmentbnker75 · 10-12-2008, 10:44 PM

well i have the newest part of this issue resolved, now i need help with an error. When i run the below command on the command line it works great:
rsync -av /localdirectory/file.log* userid@remotehost:/remote directory

But when i dump it in expect, because it required a password. This is the only way i can do this, i cant generate keys, etc...

building file list ... rsync: link_stat "localdirectory/server*" failed: No such file or directory (2)
done

Very strange.