I'm trying to write a bash script to move files from a source to a destination, in order to save space on the disk of the source (source and destination are two different machines).
I can handle the moving part by using the scp protocol, but the problem is that the software I'm using writes a lot of files very quickly (luckily each file has the same extension) and I want to move a file as soon as it is written.
So, in the directory of the source, I'd like to:
move the file on the destination,
remove the file from the source,
... until the software stops to write new files on the source.
Any help?
Thank you in advance.
This is a job for inotifywait.
inotifywait -meclose_write . |
while read d e f
do
echo Now is the time to move "$f".
done
Of course you can specify any source directory instead of ..
Related
I'm looking for a way to duplicate / clone an excel file from a source directory to a destination directory. Importantly, the source file(s) must remain in the source directory. Every example I've been able to find, however, uses the copy function of the shutil module which actually moves the source file to the destination.
What you can do is read the contents of the file into a variable, then create a new file where you want and write the contents of your variable in there.
Of course, there are better ways to do it, but this can be made cross-platform and will probably suit all your needs as long as you don't manage big files.
I am trying to use grsync (A GUI for rsync) for Windows to run backups. In the directory that I am backing up there are many larger files that are updated periodically. I would like to be able to sync just the changes to those files and not the entire file each backup. I was under the impression that rsync is a block-level file copier and would only copy the bytes that had changed between each sync. Perhaps this is not the case, or I have misunderstood what block-level file coping is!
To test this I used grsync to synchronize a 5GB zip file between two directories. Then I added a very small text file to the zip file and ran grsync again. However it proceeded to copy over the entire zip file again. Is there a utility that would only copy over the changes to this zip file and not the entire file again? Or is there a command within grsync that could be used to this effect?
The reason the entire file was copied is simply that the algorithm that handles block-level changes is disabled when copying between two directories on a local filesystem.
This would have worked, because the file is being copied (or updated) to a remote system:
rsync -av big_file.zip remote_host:
This will not use the "delta" algorithm and the entire file will be copied:
rsync -av big_file.zip D:\target\folder\
Some notes
Even if the target is a network share, rsync will treat it as path of your local filesystem and will disable the "delta" (block changes) algorithm.
Adding data to the beginning or middle of a data file will not upset the algorithm that handles the block-level changes.
Rationale
The delta algorithm is disabled when copying between two local targets because it needs to read both the source and the destination file completely in order to determine which blocks need changing. The rationale is that the time taken to read the target file is much the same as just writing to it, and so there's no point reading it first.
Workaround
If you know for definite that reading from your target filesystem is significantly faster than writing to it you can force the block-level algorithm to run by including the --no-whole-file flag.
If you add a file to a zip the entire zip file can change if the file was added as the first file in the archive. The entire archive will shift. so yours is not a valid test.
I was just looking for this myself, I think you have to use
rsync -av --inplace
for this to work.
I need to find a solution at work to backup specific folders daily, hopefully to a RAR or ZIP file.
If it was on PC, I would have done it already. But I don't have any idea to how to approach it on a Mac.
What I basically want to achieve is an automated task, that can be run with an executable, that does:
compress a specific directory (/Volumes/Audio/Shoko) to a rar or zip file.
(in the zip file exclude all *.wav files in all sub Directories and a directory names "Videos").
move It to a network share (/Volumes/Post Shared/Backup From Sound).
(or compress directly to this folder).
automate the file name of the Zip file with dynamic date and time (so no duplicate file names).
Shutdown Mac when finished.
I want to say again, I don't usually use Mac, so things like what kind of file to open for the script, and stuff like that is not trivial for me, yet.
I have tried to put Mark's bash lines (from the first answer, below) in a txt file and executed it, but it had errors and didn't work.
I also tried to use Automator, but it's too plain, no advanced options.
How can I accomplish this?
I would love a working example :)
Thank You,
Dave
You can just make a bash script that does the backup and then you can either double-click it or run it on a schedule. I don't know your paths and/or tools of choice, but some thing along these lines:
#!/bin/bash
FILENAME=`date +"/Volumes/path/to/network/share/Backup/%Y-%m-%d.tgz"`
cd /directory/to/backup || exit 1
tar -cvz "$FILENAME" .
You can save that on your Desktop as backup and then go in Terminal and type:
chmod +x ~/Desktop/backup
to make it executable. Then you can just double click on it - obviously after changing the paths to reflect what you want to backup and where to.
Also, you may prefer to use some other tools - such as rsync but the method is the same.
Can the shell override where output files are placed? (Not the console/screen output, but files created by a program.) I have a script that currently runs a sequence of input files through a program and for each one produces a lot of different output files.
for i in `seq 1 24`
do
../Bin/myprog inputfile.$i.in
done
Is there a way to create new directories for each run of the program and place the corresponding output files in each directory? So I would get dir1: <output files from run 1>; dir2 <output files from run 2> etc. I suppose one way would be to just write another script to create directories and sort all the files after the program(s) had run, but is there a more elegant way to do it?
As suggested in the comments, this might be what you need, assuming that your program just dumps output into the current working directory.
for i in `seq 1 24`
do
mkdir $i
pushd $i
../../Bin/myprog ../inputfile.$i.in
popd
done
If you are trying to change where an existing program (e.g., myprog) writes its files, this is only possible if the program writes its files relative to the current directory. In this case, the outer script that invokes myprog, can create a "destination" directory and chdir to it before invoking myprog.
If the myprog program writes to an absolute path, e.g., /var/tmp/myprog.tmp, the only way to override where this write actually goes is to place a symbolic link at the absolute path linking to the desired destination. This will only work if the program (myprog) doesn't first delete an existing file before writing to it.
The third and most extreme possibility for directing absolute file path writes is to create a chroot'ed file system, in which the myprog output files will be contained, after which the outer script can copy or move them to where they are desired.
To summarize: other than changing the source, setting the working directory for relative-path output files, or chrooting a filesystem for absolute-path files, there really is no "elegant" way to replace the actual output files used in a program.
Is anybody able to point me in the right direction for writing a batch script for a UNIX shell to move files into a zip one at at time and then delete the original.
I cant use the standard zip function because i don't have enough space to fit the zip being created.
So any suggestions please
Try this:
zip -r -m source.zip *
Not a great solution but simple, i ended up finding a python script that recursively zips a folder and just added a line to delete the file after it is added to the zip
You can achieve this using find as
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 zip -m archive
This will move every file into the zip preserving the directory structure. You are then left with empty directories that you can easily remove. Moreover using find gives you a lot of freedom on what files you want to compress.
I use :
zip --move destination.zip src_file1 src_file2
Here the detail of "--move" option from the man pages
--move
Move the specified files into the zip archive; actually, this
deletes the target directories/files after making the specified zip
archive. If a directory becomes empty after removal of the files, the
directory is also removed. No deletions are done until zip has
created the archive without error. This is useful for conserving disk
space, but is potentially dangerous so it is recommended to use it in
combination with -T to test the archive before removing all input
files.