rsync log format, having trouble with

[compallday]

I am having difficulty changing the format of rsync's output through the --log-format option. According to the man pages and many web pages the information rsync sends through to the log or stdout can be customized by setting --log-format="%some%letters", but no matter what I try the output remains the same as it is if I don't set --log-format at all.

For example:
dir1 contains f1
dir2 contains f1, f2

$ rsync -nr dir2/ dir1

returns

building file list ... done
f2

sent 60 bytes  received 24 bytes  168.00 bytes/sec
total size is 9  speedup is 0.11

and

$ rsync -nr --log-format="%f %l" dir2/ dir1

gives

building file list ... done
f2

sent 96 bytes  received 36 bytes  264.00 bytes/sec
total size is 24  speedup is 0.18

when I would expect it to return something like "f2 16" for the name(%n) and size (%l) of the file. I've looked at the man pages for rsync and rsyncd.conf and am still lost.

Can anyone help?

[compallday]

I've figured out my problem. --log-format is ignored when -n (dry run) is used.

This is annoying for troubleshooting programs and a hinderance when writing programs that use rsync to just compare two directories without transfering files.

I notified the developers of this short coming.

[compallday]

------ Additional Comment #1 From Wayne Davison 2005-03-09 10:40 [reply] -------

This is one of the fixed things in 2.6.4, now in pre-release testing.