rsync for DOS

rsync for DOS

rsync is an open source utility that provides fast incremental file transfer. rsync is freely available under the GNU General Public License. The rsync home page is at http://www.samba.org/rsync/

RSYNC 2.2.5 FOR DOS

This is a port of the standard rsync program (www.rsync.org) to the DOS operating system. It runs entirely in real mode, making it suitable for embedded and hand-held systems with only an 8086 processor and 640 KB RAM.

This rsync is necessarily a sub-set of the full rsync, partly because of memory limitations and partly because of the peculiarities of DOS. For a list of supported options, type "rsync -h" and see the rsync man pages details.

The main differences are:

Client only. It cannot be run in deamon mode
No support for rsh or ssh. It communicates with another copy of rsync running in daemon mode using a TCP/IP network connection
File names on the server must be in DOS format (that is 8.3 characters, UPPER CASE) if they are to be sync'd correctly
File data is not compressed

DOWNLOADING RSYNC

You can download the source code from here (975 KB) and you can get a pre-compiled binary from here (132 KB).

COMPILING RSYNC

To compile you will need a copy of Borland C 3.1. It may work with other versions of Broland C, but I have not tried it.

Unzip the archive into an empty directory. There is a makefile in the D16 sub directory. You will have to edit the first few lines to set it up for your environment:


    RT              = c:\tmp\rsync
    BCC31           = c:\bcc31

First, change RT to point to the directory where you installed rsync, then change BCC31 to point to your Borland compiler. Build it using Borland make: no other make will do. There are some harmless warnings during compilation.

There is a new source file, dossup.c, which contains "bridge" functions between DOS and Unix. Most of the code that is left out is identified by the NOSHELLORSERVER conditional. Some code specific to DOS may also be located by the __BORLANDC__ conditional.

USING RSYNC

Unzip the files in the archive, preferably into an empty directory. You will need to install a packet driver for your network adapter. Almost all network cards are supplied with one on the distribution diskette or CD, usually in a directory named PKTDRV. If there isn't one, a collection of packet drivers is freely available for a wide range of PC Ethernet interfaces from Crynwr (www.crynwr.com). If that fails, you can use an ODI driver if you load an ODI to packet converter after the driver. ODIPKT from FTP Software is an example of such a converter.

The TCP/IP network is provided by wattcp (http://www.erickengelke.com/wattcp/). There is a minimum amount of configuration to be done to set it up. You will need to create a file called wattcp.cfg in the same directory as rsync.exe. It should contain at least my_ip and netmask entries. If you are accessing a server that is not on the local net or subnet you will need a gateway entry. If you are addressing the server by name rather than IP address you will need one or more nameservers as well. Here is an example. Only the first two lines are necessary:


wattcp.cfg:

	my_ip=192.168.1.100
	netmask=255.255.255.0
	gateway=192.168.1.1
	nameserver=213.120.62.100
	nameserver=213.120.62.101

Using rsync on DOS is just like using it for other operating systems. For example, to sync all the files in local directory \tmp\sync to module data_files on server with IP address 192.168.1.1, type:

        rsync -rv /tmp/sync 192.168.1.1::data_files/

To sync files in the other direction, i.e. from the server to the local disk, type

        rsync -rv 192.168.1.1::data_files/ /tmp/sync

Note that in specifying the pathname on the DOS file system the slashes go the "Unix way".