Keep Remote Directory Up-to-date

Question

I absolutely love the Keep Remote Directory Up-to-date feature in Winscp. Unfortunately, I can\'t find anything as simple to use in OS X or Linux. I know the same thing can

Answer 1

What you want to do for linux remote access is use 'sshfs' - the SSH File System.

# sshfs username@host:path/to/directory local_dir

Then treat it like an network mount, which it is...

A bit more detail, like how to set it up so you can do this as a regular user, on my blog

If you want the asynchronous behavior of winSCP, you'll want to use rsync combined with something that executes it periodically. The cron solution above works, but may be overkill for the winscp use case.

The following command will execute rsync every 5 seconds to push content to the remote host. You can adjust the sleep time as needed to reduce server load.

# while true; do rsync -avrz localdir user@host:path; sleep 5; done

If you have a very large directory structure and need to reduce the overhead of the polling, you can use 'find':

# touch -d 01/01/1970 last; while true; do if [ "`find localdir -newer last -print -quit`" ]; then touch last; rsync -avrz localdir user@host:path; else echo -ne .; fi; sleep 5; done

And I said cron may be overkill? But at least this is all just done from the command line, and can be stopped via a ctrl-C.

kb