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Unison - file and directory synchroniser

Very nice file synchroniser with binaries for many platforms.

A *neat* tool: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/.

Unison runs on both Windows (95, 98, NT, and 2k) and Unix (Solaris, Linux, etc.) systems. Moreover, Unison works across platforms, allowing you to synchronize a Windows laptop with a Unix server, for example.

I’m a big fan of rsync - but this is even simpler. The main reason I like of rsync is its algorithm - very efficient. Unison uses rsync algorithm. This has a bare-bones GUI too. Unlike rsync, a unidirectional syncer, Unison can do bidirectional synchronization too.

May be this can help with our file sharing issues.

Cheat sheet to quickly using Unison:

  1. Download and install unison in the machines you want to synch. Just drop the executables somewhere in the PATH variable.
  2. Command to synch is very simple: 
    unison source target
  3. You will be prompted to choose if any conflicts arise.
  4. Here’s an easy synch command to synch from my local pc to a unix machine, without prompting and preserving timestamps. Connection is made using ssh in this case. 
    unison d:\babu\myfolders ssh://linuxmachine.mynetwork/myfoldersundermyhome -batch -times

I’ve been using Unison for 2 months now to publish to a work related PyBlosxom blog. I manage the folders in my PC and have a small DOS batch file that executes the command above to synch these to the blog. I wonder why I named the batch file as upstream.cmd :-)

Posted: May 16, 2003 08:18 AM
computing

  1. Hi,

    I have read your comment about UNISON. Question: how do I configure UNISON to work only unidirectional?

    Regards
    Markus

    Posted by: Markus Staudt on September 22, 2004 03:59 PM
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