Rsync

Rysnc is a great tool for backing up things, downloading things and keeping up with Slackware -current. Why? Because say you have a lot of files in /home/$USER/slackware/ that you want to update, say with the newest -current. ( These files would be the files off of your Slackware 10.1 disk, on the folder /slackware on the root of the Slackware disk) rsync would only download what is new and can also erase what is no longer there, this could save a lot of bandwidth. So where do we begin? Lets use a Slackware mirror and actually update your Slackware 10.1 cd , to -current. So we will use a Slackware mirror:

rsync inferno.bioinformatics.vt.edu::

The above command would list the modules on the rsync server. Well what is a module? A module is something that people export their files and directories to in a module format. So someone running a rsync server could make a module called "slackware" and export "/home/slackware/". Then the user could download all or some of the files in that module. Now lets list the files and directories of the module we need:

rsync inferno.bioinformatics.vt.edu::slackware

See from the above you can see the slackware versions we could all download. Since we have our slackware 10.1 in /home/$USER/slackware and we want to upgrade to -current, we could use this command:

rsync -rvz --delete inferno.bioinformatics.vt.edu::slackware/slackware-current/slackware/ /home/$USER/slackware/

Now this command looks weird at first, but lets examine. First the -r means recursive ( Meaning it goes through all the sub directories and downloads ). Next we see -v which means verbose, so we can see what is going on, next the -z. This means compress, it will compress the things so it will shorten the bandwidth requirement. The --delete means that it will delete anything that the server doesn't have, this would make an exact mirror copy:)! That pretty much sums that command up.

So since this was a simple rsync tutorial and pretty much told you how to download Slackware -current an efficient way, read UPGRADE.txt to find out how to fully upgrade your box:)

Thanks for reading, Sandy