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