Software update: rsync 3.1.3

A new development release of rsync has appeared on the Samba website, this time with 3.1.3 as version indication. This program provides a quick way to synchronize all or part of files between different servers and locations. It is therefore often used in the background in all kinds of synchronization programs, but can also be used, for example, for the offsite backup of file servers. If you want to know more, you can check the available documentation read through, which also lists some tutorials. The announcement is up this page and the list of changes looks like this:

SECURITY FIXES

• Fixed a buffer overrun in the protocol’s handling of xattr names and ensure that the received name is null terminated.
• Fix an issue with –protect-args where the user could specify the arg in the protected-arg list and short-circuit some of the arg-sanitizing code.

BUG FIXES:

• Don’t output about a new backup dir without appropriate info verbosity.
• Fixed some issues with the sort functions in support/rsyncstats script.
• Added a way to specify daemon config lists (eg users, groups, etc) that contain spaces (see “auth users” in the latest rsyncd.conf manpage).
• If a backup fails (eg full disk) rsync exits with an error.
• Fixed a problem with a doubled –fuzzy option combined with –link-dest.
• Avoid invalid output in the summary if either the start or end time had an error.
• We don’t allow a popt alias to affect the –daemon or –server options.
• Fix daemon exclude code to disallow attribute changes in addition to disallowing transfers.
• Don’t force nanoseconds to match if a non-transferred, non-checksummed file only passed the quick-check w/o comparing nanoseconds.

ENHANCEMENTS:

• Added the ability for rsync to compare nanosecond times in its file-check comparisons, and added support nanosecond times on Mac OS X.
• Added a short-option (-@) for –modify-window.
• Added the –checksum-choice=NAME[,NAME] option to choose the checksum algorithms.
• Added hashing of xattr names (with using -X) to improve the handling of files with large numbers of xattrs.
• Added a way to filter xattr names using include/exclude/filter rules (see the –xattrs option in the manpage for details).
• Added “daemon chroot|uid|gid” to the daemon config (in addition to the old chroot|uid|gid settings that affect the daemon’s transfer process).
• Added “syslog tag” to the daemon configuration.
• Some man page improvements.

DEVELOPER RELATED:

• Tweak the “make” output when yodl isn’t around to create the man pages.
• Changed an obsolete autoconf compile macro.
• Support newer yodl versions when converting man pages.