Download rsync 2.6.6

A new version of rsync has been released on the Samba.org website with 2.6.6 as the version number. The program provides a quick way to synchronize changes to a file to another location. It is therefore widely used in all kinds of synchronization programs, but also, for example, on file servers to be able to offer snapshot functionalities. If you want to know more about this, you can documentation read through which also lists some tutorials. The announcement is as follows:

I have released rsync version 2.6.6. This release is a bug-fix release to handle a null-pointer bug that turned up in rsync’s version of zlib 1.1.4 (this is not the recent zlib 1.2.2 security fix, which did not affect rsync) and to squash a few other minor bugs. To deal with the zlib issue, rsync has been upgraded to include zlib 1.2.3.

Security fixes:

The zlib code was upgraded to version 1.2.3 in order to make it more secure. While the widely-publicized security problem in zlib 1.2.2 did not affect rsync, another security problem surfaced that affects rsync’s zlib 1.1.4.

Bug fixes:

• The setting of flist->high in clean_flist() was wrong for an empty list. This could cause flist_find() to crash in certain rare circumstances (eg if just the right directory setup was around when –fuzzy was combined with –link-dest).
• The outputting of hard-linked files when verbosity was > 1 was not right: without -i it would output the name of each hard-linked file as though it had been changed (it now outputs a “is hard linked” message for the file ); with -i it would output all dots for the unchanged attributes of a hard-link (it now changes those dots to spaces, as is done for other totally unchanged items).
• When backing up a changed symlink or device, get rid of any old backup item so that we don’t get an “already exists” error.
• A couple places that were comparing a local and a remote modification-time were not honoring the –modify-window option.
• Fixed a bug where the ‘p’ (permissions) itemized-changes flag might get set too often (if some non-significant mode bits differed).
• Fixed a really old, minor bug that could cause rsync to warn about being unable to mkdir() a path that ends in “/.” because it just created the directory (required –relative, –no-implied-dirs, a source path that ended in either a trailing slash or a trailing “/.”, and a non-existing destination dir to tickle the bug in a recent version).

Enhancements:

• Made the “max verbosity” setting in the rsyncd.conf file settable on a per-module basis (which now matches the documentation).
• The support/rrsync script has been upgraded to verify the args of options that take args (instead of rejecting any such options). The script was also changed to try to be more secure and to fix a problem in the parsing of a pull operation that has multiple sources.
• Improved the documentation that explains the difference between a normal daemon transfer and a daemon-over remote-shell transfer.
• Some of the diffs supplied in the patches dir were fixed and/or improved.

Build changes:

• Made configure define NOBODY_USER (currently hard-wired to “nobody”) and NOBODY_GROUP (set to either “nobody” or “nogroup” depending on what we find in the /etc/group file).
• Added a test to the test suite, itemized.test, that tests the output of -i (log-format w/%i) and some double-verbose messages.