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rsync

    1: rsyncsh
    2: Copyright (C) 2001 by Martin Pool
    3: 
    4: This is a quick hack to build an interactive shell around rsync, the
    5: same way we have the ftp, lftp and ncftp programs for the FTP
    6: protocol.  The key application for this is connecting to a public
    7: rsync server, such as rsync.kernel.org, change down through and list
    8: directories, and finally pull down the file you want.
    9: 
   10: rsync is somewhat ill-at-ease as an interactive operation, since every
   11: network connection is used to carry out exactly one operation.  rsync
   12: kind of "forks across the network" passing the options and filenames
   13: to operate upon, and the connection is closed when the transfer is
   14: complete.  (This might be fixed in the future, either by adapting the
   15: current protocol to allow chained operations over a single socket, or
   16: by writing a new protocol that better supports interactive use.)
   17: 
   18: So, rsyncsh runs a new rsync command and opens a new socket for every
   19: (network-based) command you type.
   20: 
   21: This has two consequences.  Firstly, there is more command latency
   22: than is really desirable.  More seriously, if the connection cannot be
   23: done automatically, because for example it uses SSH with a password,
   24: then you will need to enter the password every time.  We might even
   25: fix this in the future, though, by having a way to automatically feed
   26: the password to SSH if it's entered once.