Using rsync for backups, because it's not shiny and new

mesa@piefed.social · 14 hours ago

Using rsync for backups, because it's not shiny and new

i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca · 13 hours ago

The thing I hate most about rsync is that I always fumble to get the right syntax and flags.

This is a problem because once it’s working I never have to touch it ever again because it just works and keeping working. There’s not enough time to memorize the usage.

mesa@piefed.social · 13 hours ago

I feel this too. I have a couple of “spells” that work wonders in a literal small notebook with other one liners over the years. Its my spell book lol.

oddlyqueer@lemmy.ml · 13 hours ago

This is why I still don’t know sed and awk syntax lol. I eventually get the data in the shape I need and then move on, and never imprint how they actually work. Still feel like a script kiddie every time I use them (so once every few years).

tal@olio.cafe · edit-2 13 hours ago

sed can do a bunch of things, but I overwhelmingly use it for a single operation in a pipeline: the s// operation. I think that that’s worth knowing.

sed 's/foo/bar/'

will replace all the first text in each line matching the regex “foo” with “bar”.

That’ll already handle a lot of cases, but a few other helpful sub-uses:

sed 's/foo/bar/g'

will replace all text matching regex “foo” with “bar”, even if there are more than one per line

sed 's/\([0-9a-f]*\)/0x\1/g

will take the text inside the backslash-escaped parens and put that matched text back in the replacement text, where one has ‘\1’. In the above example, that’s finding all hexadecimal strings and prefixing them with ‘0x’

If you want to match a literal “/”, the easiest way to do it is to just use a different separator; if you use something other than a “/” as separator after the “s”, sed will expect that later in the expression too, like this:

sed 's%/%SLASH%g

will replace all instances of a “/” in the text with “SLASH”.

NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip · edit-2 13 hours ago

One trick that one of my students taught me a decade or so ago is to actually make an alias to list the useful flags.

Yes, a lot of us think we are smart and set up aliases/functions and have a huge list of them that we never remember or, even worse, ONLY remember. What I noticed her doing was having something like goodman-rsync that would just echo out a list of the most useful flags and what they actually do.

So nine times out of 10 I just want rsync -azvh --progress ${SRC} ${DEST} but when I am doing something funky and am thinking “I vaguely recall how to do this”? dumbman rsync and I get a quick cheat sheet of what flags I have found REALLY useful in the past or even just explaining what azvh actually does without grepping past all the crap I don’t care about in the man page. And I just keep that in the repo of dotfiles I copy to machines I work on regularly.

muix@lemmy.sdf.org · 11 hours ago

tldr and atuin have been my main way of remembering complex but frequent flag combinations

NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip · 10 hours ago

Yeah. There are a few useful websites I end up at that serve similar purposes.

My usual workflow is that I need to be able to work in an airgapped environment where it is a lot easier to get “my dotfiles” approved than to ask for utility packages like that. Especially since there will inevitably be some jackass who says “You don’t know how to work without google? What are we paying you for?” because they mostly do the same task every day of their life.

And I do find that writing the cheat sheet myself goes a long way towards me actually learning them so I don’t always need it. But I know that is very much how my brain works (I write probably hundreds of pages of notes a year… I look at maybe two pages a year).

tal@olio.cafe · 13 hours ago

Most Unix commands will show a short list of the most-helpful flags if you use --help or -h.