#23 "Checking TOC" sometimes splurs out long diff lists to cron report

[Jarno Elonen]

Sometimes, perhaps especially when a new empty backup media is inserted, backup2l v1.5 includes very long diff lists to the cron job report.

I guess that's a bug since they aren't really useful in the report (a simple so-and-so many files would suffice) and today I actually got a "message too long" error from the email system.

Here's an example:

  Removing old backups...

  Preparing full backup <domo-a.1>...
    173303 / 173303 file(s), 15558 / 15558 dir(s), 10.8GB / 10.8GB (uncompressed)
    skipping: 0 file(s), 0 dir(s), 0 B (uncompressed)

  Creating archive using 'DRIVER_MY_DAR'...
  Checking TOC of archive file (< real file, > archive entry)...
    1,173303c1,27
    < /mnt/backup/backup-in/domo-a/.bash_history
    < /mnt/backup/backup-in/domo-a/.joe_state
    < /mnt/backup/backup-in/domo-a/.subversion/README.txt
    < /mnt/backup/backup-in/domo-a/.subversion/config
    < /mnt/backup/backup-in/domo-a/.subversion/servers
    < /mnt/backup/backup-in/domo-a/bin/afio
    < /mnt/backup/backup-in/domo-a/bin/bash
    (etc, for thounds of lines..)
</domo-a.1>

(Yes, /mnt/backup/backup-in is intentional -- output goes to /mnt/backup/backup-out.)

Here's my DAR driver, in case that's a possible reason:

:::bash
# Driver for 'dar'. Compressed files, random access, support for owerns, permissions, symlinks.
DRIVER_MY_DAR ()
{
    DARBASE=$(echo "$3" | sed 's/[.]1[.]dar$//')
    case $1 in
        -test)
            require_tools dar
            echo "ok"
            ;;
        -suffix)
            echo "1.dar"
            ;;
        -create)        # Arguments: $2 = BID, $3 = archive file name, $4 = file list file
            dar -Q -q --no-warn -z6 -Z "*.jpg" -Z "*.zip" -Z "*.png" -Z "*.gz" -Z "*.tgz" -Z "*.bz2" -Z "*.7z" -Z "*.rar" --fs-root / --include-from-file "$
            ;;
        -toc)           # Arguments: $2 = BID, $3 = archive file name
            # Filter out list header, plain directories and file attributes
            dar -Q -l "$DARBASE"  2>&1 | tail -n +3 | grep -v "\[[^]]*\][ \t]*\[[^]]*\][ \t]*d"  | sed "s/.*\t//;s#^#/#" | sort
            ;;
        -extract)       # Arguments: $2 = BID, $3 = archive file name, $4 = file list file
            cat "$4"
            dar -Q -q --include-from-file "$4" -x "$DARBASE" 2>&1
            ;;
    esac
}

[Jarno Elonen]

Ah, most of the extra lines seems to have caused by -q in "-toc", which is not shown in here -- I was running a different version of the driver than the one I quoted here.

However, somewhat shorter file lists have also sometimes appeared before I switched from afio to dar. What is the diff supposed to do at "Checking TOC of archive file"? Is it basically a list of files that apparently didn't make it to the backup file, indicating some problems in the system or the driver?

If so, perhaps a 'head -n 48' and a note of the complete list's location would be a good idea for long lists to avoid oversized cron reports..?