ubuntuunison

Unison: how to sync specific subfolders in several directories?

I am trying to sync a subset of my directories between two machines (both Ubuntu 16.04) with Unison (version 2.48.3). On both machines, I have a directory called "research". It contains a folder for each project that I am working on. Within each of these folders, there is a folder named "lit", and I would like to synchronize all those "lit" folders with unison, without really having to care about the project names themselves.
Example: on both machines, there are the following folders:

/home/chris/research/projA/lit
/home/chris/research/projA/otherstuff
/home/chris/research/projB/lit
/home/chris/research/projB/otherstuff

And of these I want to sync projA/lit across the two machines, and also projB/lit.

I have installed Unison, and read myself through the manpage. Based on that, I have modified the Unison profile file default.prf as follows:

# Unison preferences file
# used for syncing lit between work and home

# roots
root = /home/chris/research
root = ssh://pc-work//home/chris/research

# paths
path = */lit

While Unison connects successfully to my work computer, it does not find anything to sync.
If in contrast, I replace path = */lit in the above profile with path = projA/lit, it works.

Thus, the question: can I get Unison to sync the lit subfolder for all projects without having to specify these, and if so, how? Or do I have to wrap the unison command in some sort of loop in order to iterate through all project folders?

Solution

  • path is not the right way to achieve what you want. From the documentation on path:

    Note that path preferences are intepreted literally—they are not regular expressions.

    Even though you're not using a regular expression, but a shell glob, I take the above to mean that the value of path isn't interpreted specially by unison.

    You could achieve the effect you're after, though, by judicious use of ignore and/or ignorenot. Those do allow shell globs or regular expressions.

    For example, (disclaimer: I haven't tested this)

    ignore = Path proj*/otherstuff

    for any directory that you want to skip while synchronizing. You could also specify it the other way around, if you have more directories to skip than to synchronize:

    ignore = Path proj*/*
ignorenot = Path proj*/lit

    Note that you don't need to set path if the files and directories you want to synchronize are already directly under the root you specify.