Hi folks, "--numeric-ids" is a lot of text and easy to be forgotten or misspelled. Since it is a highly important option for making backups of remote systems via rsync I wonder if "-N" could be introduced as an abbreviation for "--numeric-ids"? "-N" is not in use yet, afaics. Just a suggestion, of course. Keep on your good work. Regards Harri
Created attachment 12689 [details] proposed patch
The -N option is the letter that the crtimes patch uses for --crtimes, so I consider it already allocated. One thing you can use is the popt (option parsing) library's support for aliases in both /etc/popt and ~/.popt -- e.g.: rsync alias -N --numeric-ids rsync alias -9 -ai --numeric-ids --chmod=o-rwx --omit-link-times As long as you allocate your hosts with a consistent /etc/popt file, you can treat the option the same as if it were compiled into the executable.
I have several objections: * --numeric-ids is in wide use, while there is no --crtimes in rsync yet * --crtimes is useful only on MacOS, --numeric-ids on all Unix-like platforms. The probality for someone using --numeric-ids is much higher. * There is no "n" in "crtimes". The letter was chosen just because it was free. Another char could be used just as easy. But "N" == "numeric"? Thats easy to remember. Of course the --crtimes is a useful option for the MacOS command line users, but maybe Apple is dropping this feature in their new file system next week.
PS: The popt feature is interesting, but I made this suggestion for the benefit of *all* rsync users. Not to mention that there would be no error message if the /etc/popt and ~/.popt files are missing and rsync would silently use --crtimes instead, mapping it to NOOP. Please reconsider.