Syncing With a Flash Drive

[Masterofpsi]

Hi all. New to Bash; writing a script to sync a flash drive with a folder on my hard drive. This is what I have so far:

#!/bin/bash

drive=CHARON
usr=nicholas

set -x

#If the drive is not designed to sync (has no sync directory), the program quits.
files=/media/$drive/sync/'*'

#Create a corresponding sync folder on the main drive if necessary.
mkdir -p /home/$usr/sync/$drive

#Recursively delete all files in the base drive not in the external drive.
cd; cd sync; cd $drive
testFile=/media/$drive/sync
function clean_up_wd
{
for f in `ls`
do
testFile="$testFile"/"$f"
if [ ! -e "$testFile" ]
then
rm -r `pwd`/"$f"
elif [ -d "$f" ]
then
cd "$f"
clean_up_wd
fi
testFile=`dirname "$testFile"`
done
}
clean_up_wd

#Copy over all files on the external drive.
for f in $files
do
cp -r $f /home/$usr/sync/$drive
done

The part that's giving me trouble is the clean_up_wd function---it doesn't behave like I want it to. It treats spaces as path separators, and while I usually avoid spaces, I can't promise myself that everyone else can--so what can I do to avoid that?

[bigtomrodney]

I don't know if this will be good news or bad news, but there's a great program called rsync that will do what you're looking for with a lot less effort. It has all sorts of great options for tweaking the sync to your needs.

rsync -uav --delete $f /home/$user/sync/$drive

Of course until this is behaving the way you want it to you might want to exclude the --delete switch