Release of file synchronization utility Rsync 3.2.4

After one and a half years of development, Rsync 3.2.4 is now available. This file synchronization and backup utility minimizes traffic through incremental copying of changes. It can use ssh, rsh, or its own rsync protocol for transport. It supports the organization of anonymous rsync servers, which are ideally suited for synchronizing mirrors. The project's code is distributed under the GPLv3 license.

Among the added changes:

• A new method for protecting command line arguments has been proposed, which resembles the previously available option ‘—protect-args’ (‘-s’), but does not disrupt the operation of the rrsync (restricted rsync) script. Protection involves escaping special characters, including spaces, when passing requests to an external command interpreter. The new method does not escape special characters within a quoted block, allowing simple quoting of file names without additional escaping, for example, the command ‘rsync -aiv host:’a simple file.pdf’ .’ is now permitted. To revert to the old behavior, the option ‘—old-args’ and the environment variable ‘RSYNC_OLD_ARGS=1’ have been provided.
• A long-standing issue with processing decimal comma characters according to the current locale (',' instead of '.') has been resolved. For scripts designed to handle only the '.' character in numbers, the locale ‘C’ can be set in case of compatibility issues.
• A vulnerability (CVE-2018-25032) in the included code from the zlib library, which leads to a buffer overflow when attempting to compress a specially prepared sequence of characters, has been fixed.
• The option ‘—fsync’ has been implemented to call the fsync() function for every file operation to flush the disk cache.
• In the rsync-ssl script, the ‘-verify_hostname’ option has been enabled when accessing openssl.
• The ‘—copy-devices’ option has been added for copying device files as regular files.
• Memory consumption has been reduced when incrementally transferring a large number of small directories.
• On macOS, the ‘—atimes’ option has been enabled.
• The ability to update xattrs attributes for files in read-only mode has been implemented, if the user has permission to change access rights (e.g., when run with root privileges).
• The parameter “—info=NONREG” has been added and enabled by default to display warnings about the transfer of special files.
• The rrsync (restricted rsync) script has been rewritten in Python. New options “-munge”, “-no-lock”, and “-no-del” have been added. By default, the options “—copy-links” (-L), “—copy-dirlinks” (-k), and “—keep-dirlinks” (-K) are enabled to complicate attacks that manipulate symbolic directory links.
• The atomic-rsync script has been rewritten in Python and enhanced with the ability to ignore non-zero return codes. By default, code 24, which is issued when files are lost during the rsync process (for example, code 24 is returned for temporary files that were present during the initial indexing but were deleted by the time of transfer), is ignored.
• The munge-symlinks script has been rewritten in Python.

Source: opennet.ru