Mirroring Software

[David C. Snyder]

Hello Dan,

About a year or so ago, I hacked together a couple of perl scripts for
pulling down the latest slackware through my dial-up shell account and
down to my PC at home via ZMODEM.  For this purpose, it works quite well.
It has also been used to mirror software on internet connected machines.
For that it works, but it's not at all efficient because it opens a new
ftp session for every file that must be updated.  For something like a
Linux distribution, that can meen thousands of ftp sessions.  Yuck!

Still, the main script is well documented and should not be hard to
tinker with if you are at all familiar with perl.  If you fix it so
that it pulls down more than one file per ftp session, I'd be
interested in seeing what you had to do.  You can find this script on
ftp://ftp.mindspring.com/users/dsnyder.  The files start with
"pmirror".  The .zip file is the DOS version.  Don's ask...

-- David
   dsnyder at mindspring.com

P.S.
  One gotcha to watch out for is "Step 9", the &rm_files() function.
  I use this to remove all files on the local system that are obsolete
  or that are not present on the remote machine.  If you setup the
  filter patterns wrong, this can completely wipe out the destination
  directory.  You may want to comment out this function until you are
  confident that things are working the way you expect.  Have fun...