Preserving access times on source files

[Dan Rench]

I was disappointed when I found out that -t ("preserve times") only
applies to the destination.  In other words, when you rsync a file, its
atime gets updated.  Yes, rsync does access the file to read it, but if
I'm doing periodic archival rsyncs, I want to preserve the last "real"
access, not the one by the last backup process.

I'm including a patch against version 2.4.4 sender.c to preserve the
access time on source files.  It's a bit crude (in that it preserves the
atimes whether you specified -t or not, doesn't check to see if the
utimes() call succeeded, and I've only tested it with FreeBSD 3.x)
but it works for me.  Consider this a proof of concept if you like.

Perhaps this could be turned on with a different command line option,
separate from -t.  I'd definitely want it turned on as one of the functions
of -a.


--- sender.c-orig       Wed Aug 16 10:16:54 2000
+++ sender.c    Wed Aug 16 10:37:50 2000
@@ -93,6 +93,7 @@
        int phase = 0;
        extern struct stats stats;
        struct stats initial_stats;
+    struct timeval preserve_time[2];
 
        if (verbose > 2)
                rprintf(FINFO,"send_files starting\n");
@@ -160,6 +161,18 @@
                        return;
                }
          
+        if (stat(fname,&st) == -1) {
+            io_error = 1;
+            rprintf(FERROR,"send_files failed to stat %s: %s\n",
+                fname,strerror(errno));
+            free_sums(s);
+            continue;
+        }
+        preserve_time[0].tv_sec  = st.st_atime;
+        preserve_time[0].tv_usec = 0;
+        preserve_time[1].tv_sec  = st.st_mtime;
+        preserve_time[1].tv_usec = 0;
+
                fd = do_open(fname, O_RDONLY, 0);
                if (fd == -1) {
                        io_error = 1;
@@ -209,6 +222,7 @@
                  
                if (buf) unmap_file(buf);
                close(fd);
+        utimes(fname,preserve_time);
          
                free_sums(s);