Ubuntu – sync a directory between OSX and Ubuntu

mac-osxrsyncsynchronizationUbuntuunison

I need a good way to sync a directory between my OSX 10.6 laptop and my Ubuntu Desktop. Dropbox would obviously be a great choice, however the directory I need to sync is owned by root on both machines and fixing the permissions would screw up the situation I have going. I was considering just writing my own script using rsync (which would indeed be fun) but I'm wondering if perhaps there is something a bit more robust out there. I've heard of Unison, but I don't know very much about it. Would that be a good option for me, or can you come up with something better? Thanks!

Best Answer

two easy answers, (and the same you've already mentioned):

Unison if you want something that 'just works'. Has a nice GUI and you can easily define a task there and call from command line, a script, cron, whatever. I use it to synchronize both my laptop and my wife's with our respective user directories on the desktop. It's really that easy.
rsync if you want to control (almost) every aspect. There's lots of arguments that let you respect, modify or clobber permissions, onwers by number or by name, etc. In fact, there's seldom any need for a complete script; usually you only have to find (by trial and error) the best combination of arguments.

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Linux – Functional Differences Between .profile, .bash_profile, and .bashrc

.bash_profile and .bashrc are specific to bash, whereas .profile is read by many shells in the absence of their own shell-specific config files. (.profile was used by the original Bourne shell.) .bash_profile or .profile is read by login shells, along with .bashrc; subshells read only .bashrc. (Between job control and modern windowing systems, .bashrc by itself doesn't get used much. If you use screen or tmux, screens/windows usually run subshells instead of login shells.)

The idea behind this was that one-time setup was done by .profile (or shell-specific version thereof), and per-shell stuff by .bashrc. For example, you generally only want to load environment variables once per session instead of getting them whacked any time you launch a subshell within a session, whereas you always want your aliases (which aren't propagated automatically like environment variables are).

Other notable shell config files:

/etc/bash_profile (fallback /etc/profile) is read before the user's .profile for system-wide configuration, and likewise /etc/bashrc in subshells (no fallback for this one). Many systems including Ubuntu also use an /etc/profile.d directory containing shell scriptlets, which are . (source)-ed from /etc/profile; the fragments here are per-shell, with *.sh applying to all Bourne/POSIX compatible shells and other extensions applying to that particular shell.

Syncing files with rsync by file names only, ignore directories

Probably the simplest way to solve moving all files from on directory tree to a single directly would be using find with the -type and -exec options. The -type option limits the output to a specific type of directory entry (f for file, d for directory, etc.). The -exec option passes the name found (as {}) to a command line with options.

A couple examples follow:

find /directory/top/ -type f -exec rsync {} desthost:/destdir 

find /directory/top/ -type f -exec scp {} desthost:/destdir

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