# 2026-06-10 - Using Openrsync Instead Of Rsync
       
       I finally got around to replacing rsync with openrsync and i'm a
       happy camper.  So far i am using it on Slackware 15 and NetBSD 10.1.
       
       I began with the latest commit [48070e6], and got coredumps.  This is
       a known issue [1].  I resolved it by using the earlier commit
       [8f39166] instead.
       
       I installed it like so:
       
           $ ./configure PREFIX=/home/ben/local
           $ make
           $ make install
       
       It didn't compile "out of the box" on NetBSD.  The following local
       change worked around this.
       
           --- main.c.orig 2026-06-10 15:58:23.328395908 -0700
           +++ main.c      2026-06-10 15:58:32.424453429 -0700
           @@ -40,6 +40,7 @@
           
            #include "extern.h"
            #include "rules.h"
           +#include <limits.h>
           
            static struct opts opts;
            typedef int (rsync_option_filter)(struct sess *, int, ...
       
       I was lucky because i happened to only use rsync command-line
       arguments that were also supported by openrsync.  However, i ran into
       one surprise: In contrast to rsync, openrsync requires the
       destination to be a directory.  I used the following kludge.
       
           OLD: rsync /dir/file.db host:/dir/file.new
           
           NEW: cp /dir/file.db /dir/file.new
           NEW: openrsync /dir/file.new host:/dir/
           NEW: rm /dir/file.new
       
       Why would i do this?  To sync a database to a different file on the
       remote side, waiting to clobber the remote database until after the
       synchronization has completed.
       
       Comparing stripped executable sizes on NetBSD,
       rsync 3.4.3 is 511464 bytes and openrsync is 135376 bytes.
       I thought it was interesting that openrsync uses a single process
       with an event loop.  In contrast, rsync forks multiple processes.
       
       Thank you OpenBSD for providing this alternative!
       
       tags: bencollver,technical,unix
       
       # Footnotes
       
  HTML [1] Assertion failure since 48070e68d73f
       
       # Tags
       
   DIR bencollver
   DIR technical
   DIR unix