Download rsync 3.0.8

A new edition of rsync has appeared on the Samba website, this time with 3.0.8 as version indication. This program provides a quick way to synchronize all or part of files between different servers and locations. It is therefore often used in the background in all kinds of synchronization programs, but can also be used for the offsite backup of file servers, for example. If you want to know more, you can check the available documentation read through, which also lists some tutorials. The announcement is up this page and the list of changes looks like this:

BUG FIXES:

• Fixed two buffer-overflow issues: one where a directory path that is exactly MAXPATHLEN was not handled correctly, and one handling a –backup-dir that is extra extra large.
• Fixed a data-corruption issue when preserving hard-links without preserving file ownership, and doing deletions either before or during the transfer (CVE-2011-1097). This fixes some assert errors in the hard-linking code, and some potential failed checksums (via -c) that should have matched.
• Fixed a potential crash when an rsync daemon has a filter/exclude list and the transfer is using ACLs or xattrs.
• Fixed a hang if a really large file is being processed by an rsync that can’t handle 64-bit numbers. Rsync will now complain about the file being too big and skip it.
• For devices and special files, we now avoid gathering useless ACL and/or xattr information for files that aren’t being copied. (The un-copied files are still put into the file list, but there’s no need to gather data that is not going to be used.) This ensures that if the user uses –no-D, that rsync can’t possibly complain about being unable to gather extended information from special files that are in the file list (but not in the transfer).
• Properly handle requesting remote filenames that start with a dash. This avoids a potential error where a filename could be interpreted as a (usually invalid) option.
• Fixed a bug in the comparing of upper-case letters in file suffixes for –skip-compress.
• If an rsync daemon has a module configured without a path setting, rsync will now disallow access to that module.
• If the destination arg is an empty string, it will be treated as a reference to the current directory (as 2.x used to do).
• If rsync was compiled with a newer time-setting function (such as lutimes), rsync will fall-back to an older function (such as utimes) on a system where the newer function is not around. This helps to make the rsync binary more portable in mixed-OS-release situations.
• Fixed a batch-file writing bug that would not write out the full set of compatibility flags that the transfer was using. This fixes a potential protocol problem for a batch file that contains a sender-side I/O error: it would have been sent in a way that the batch-reader wasn’t expecting.
• Some improvements to the hard-linking code to ensure that device-number hashing is working right, and to supply more information if the hard-link code fails.
• The –inplace code was improved to not search for an impossible checksum position. The quadruple verbose chunk[N] message will now mention when an inplace chunk was handled by a seek rather than a read+write.
• Improved ACL mask handling, eg for Solaris.
• Fixed a bug that prevented –numeric-ids from disabling the translation of user/group IDs for ACLs.
• Fixed an issue where an xattr and/or ACL transfer that used an alt-dest option (eg –link-dest) could output an error trying to itemize the changes against the alt-dest directory’s xattr/ACL info but was instead trying to access the not-yet-existing new destination directory.
• Improved xattr system-error messages to mention the full path to the file.
• The –link-dest checking for identical symlinks now avoids considering attribute differences that cannot be changed on the receiver.
• Avoid trying to read/write xattrs on certain file types for certain OSes. Improved configure to set NO_SYMLINK_XATTRS, NO_DEVICE_XATTRS, and/or NO_SPECIAL_XATTRS defines in config.h.
• Improved the unsafe-symlink errors messages.
• Fixed a bug setting xattrs on new files that aren’t user writable.
• Avoid re-setting xattrs on a hard-linked file w/the same xattrs.
• Fixed a bug with –fake-super when copying files and dirs that aren’t user writable.
• Fixed a bug where a sparse file could have its last sparse block turned into a real block when rsync sets the file size (requires ftruncate).
• If a temp-file name is too long, rsync now avoids truncating the name in the middle of adjacent high-bit characters. This prevents a potential filename error if the filesystem doesn’t allow a name to contain an invalid multi-byte sequence.
• If a muli-protocol socket connection fails (ie, when contacting a daemon), we now report all the failures, not just the last one. This avoids losing a relevant error (eg an IPv4 connection-refused error) that happened before the final error (eg an IPv6 protocol-not-supported error).
• Generate a transfer error if we try to call chown with a -1 for a uid or a gid (which is not settable).
• Fixed the working of –force when used with –one-file-system.
• Fix the popt arg parsing so that an option that doesn’t take an arg will reject an attempt to supply one (can configure –with-included-popt if your system’s popt library doesn’t yet have this fix).
• A couple minor option tweaks to the support/rrsync script, and also some regex changes that make vim highlighting happier.
• Fixed some issues in the support/mnt-excl script.
• Various man page improvements.

ENHANCEMENTS:

• Added “.hg/” to the default cvs excludes (see -C & –cvs-exclude).

DEVELOPER RELATED:

• Use lchmod() whenever it is available (not just on symlinks).
• A couple fixes to the socketpair_tcp() routine.
• Updated the helper scripts in the packaging subdirectory.
• Renamed configure.in to configure.ac.
• Fixed configure’s checking for iconv routines for newer OS X versions.
• Fixed the testsuite/xattrs.test script on OS X.