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My program copies/synchronizes several directories from source to target, each using rsync. For each directory, if the version in target is not identical to source, and thus rsync modifies the target, I would like to notify the user with a message like "directory X has been synchronized to target". On the other hand, if target version is already identical to target, I can skip showing this message since there is no change in target.

Exit status and -n option do not differentiate between the two condition. Aside from parsing the output of -v, is there any other way for me to get rsync to provide this information?

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This may do the job:

rsync --log-format=%f ...

Note that rsync outputs files anytime any attribute changes, not only if the content of the file is updated.

There is also a -i option (or --log-format=%i) that itemizes all of the changes. See the rsync man page for details of the output format.

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  • Thanks. I'll try --log-format=SomeUniqueString which makes the rsync output easily grep-able to detect modified/added files. For files deleted in target, I'll still have to parse /^deleting /m pattern.
    – Steven Haryanto
    Aug 31, 2013 at 5:25

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