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File Synchronization

Neither of the two speciﬁed paths exists.

If everything works, omit the option -testserver. During the ﬁrst syn-

chronization, Unison does not yet know the relationship between the two

directories and submits suggestions for the transfer direction of the indi-

vidual ﬁles and directories. The arrows in the ‘Action’ column indicate the

transfer direction. A question mark means that Unison is not able to make a

suggestion regarding the transfer direction as both versions were changed

or are new.

The arrow keys can be used to set the transfer direction for the individual

entries. If the transfer directions are correct for all displayed entries, simply

click ‘Go’.

The characteristics of Unison (e.g., whether to perform the synchronization

automatically in clear cases) can be controlled by means of command-line

parameters speciﬁed when the program is started. The complete list of all

parameters can be viewed with unison --help.

For each pair, a synchronization log is maintained in the user directory ~/

.unison. Conﬁguration sets, such as ~/.unison/example.prefs, can

also be stored in this directory.

To start the synchronization, specify this ﬁle as the command-line parame-

ter as in unison example.prefs.

23.3.3 For More Information

The ofﬁcial documentation of Unison is extremely useful. For this reason,

this section merely provides a brief introduction. The complete manual is

available at http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ and

in the SUSE unison.

23.4 Introduction to CVS

CVS is suitable for synchronization purposes if individual ﬁles are edited

frequently and are stored in a ﬁle format, such as ASCII text or program

source text. The use of CVS for synchronizing data in other formats, such

as JPEG ﬁles, is possible, but leads to large amounts of data, as all variants

of a ﬁle are stored permanently on the CVS server. In such cases, most of

the capabilities of CVS cannot be used. The use of CVS for synchronizing

ﬁles is only possible if all workstations can access the same server.

563SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server